Re: bugs in Dia for Windows

[Jaime Sanchez <jsanchezd gmail com>]

Perhaps you should try out Inkscape, http://www.inkscape.org/

It is a free, open-source interactive SVG editor. I know because I use 
it, and it's very intuitive. The way I see it, Dia, looks just like 
Sodipodi and GIMP, and it is awkward to use.
Inkscape is a fork of Sodipodi but it boasts much more features and it 
is more consistent.


Paul Balyoz wrote:
> I have been looking for a good replacement for Visio for Windows, and 
> stumbled upon Dia.  Dia looked very promising, but has way too many 
> bugs at this time.  I don't have time to type them all into Bugzilla, 
> but I didn't want to move on without at least saying something to the 
> developers.  Here are a few notes I made while using Dia during the 
> past 2 days.  This is for the latest stable release, splash screen 
> says version 0.95-1.
>  
> * font size defaults to humongous drawing size with teeny paper on the 
> screen, for the default of zoom=100%.  The percent is totally wrong, 
> 285% is closer to 1:1 what you see on the screen, versus actual paper 
> size.
>  
> * there aren't enough features when you ctrl-click or shift-click, or 
> combinations of those.  Let me select multiple boxes to make a 
> properties-change to, by shift-click/ctrl-click.
>  
> * CTRL-Y should do "again" operation.  In other words, repeat the last 
> operation on the currently selected items.
>    i.e. when resizing font of a text area, I want to resize ALL of 
> them, one at a time, by selecting the next one and hitting ^Y.
>  
> * Font size makes no sense: what is "0.80"?  It's a giant font.  0.20 
> is a teeny tiny font, about 1/10th the size of 0.80.
>  
> * properties of an item need more features, like edit-box for the text 
> inside it (where you can range select or shift-drag the text).
>  
> * Please enable printing of "only page 1", or "pages 2-3", that sort 
> of feature.  It's disabled on Windows.
>  
> * need icon binding for .dia files in windows (windows just uses the 
> generic unknown file type icon today).
>  
> * holding ctrl, or shift, or alt and dragging the end of a line does 
> not snap it to its own vert/horiz alignment, or to any grid lines, 
> that I could see.
>  
> * Dia opens in weird size window, regardless of size of diagram or 
> size of screen.  If you resize it and quit, it doesn't save the window 
> size, so you get the weird size everytime you open the file.
>  
> * You can't select text in an editable text area (standalone text, or 
> text in a box); therefore you cannot replace a word or sentence, you 
> have to
>    mouse around and backspace to erase a part and retype it.  This 
> means you also can't copy text to another place.
>  
> * No way to change font size/style for a portion of text - like, I 
> cannot make a box with a big-point bold word first, then smaller 
> italic words below it.
>  
> * there's a bug where part of the text in a box is obviously one font 
> size and part is another, but there's no way to fix it.  I think it's 
> screen bug only, printing the diagram resulted in all same size font 
> as expected.
>  
> * selection-rectangle sometimes seems to select objects that it merely 
> touches (not completely engulfing); however, if "not enough" of the 
> object was touched, it is not selected.
>    I can't predict how much of an object to touch to make it select 
> the object every time.
>  
> * Properties dialog: pressing ENTER does not dismiss the box by 
> clicking the OK button, even though OK is colored like it is the 
> default button.
>  
> * No way to tell the flowchart square box that its inner text should 
> be vertical justified "top". It's always center-justified, vertically.
>  
> * If you have dual windows such that your secondary screen is to the 
> side of your primary one but up "higher" 20 to 40 pixels, then Dia 
> opens its main window up too high so you can't see the top part of it, 
> and you can't drag it, get to any menus, or dismiss it!  90% of Dia's 
> functionality is now broken, from my point of view.
>  
> * Default margins of 2+ inches on each side is way way too large; 
> should default to about .5 inches (1.2 cm) or so, for drawing 
> applications.
>  
> I hope some/all of this was useful to the developers.  I think Dia has 
> a good future, after these kinds of issues are resolved.  I will 
> visit Dia again in another year or so.
>  
> Keep up the good work.
>  
> -- paul
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