Re: bugs in Dia for Windows

[Lars Clausen <lars raeder dk>]

On Fri, 2006-08-18 at 21:27 +0200, christian ridderstrom gmail com
wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Aug 2006, Jim Clark wrote:
>
> > So the grumps appear from nowhere, write a laundry list of complaints 
> > and disappear. Well I use Dia regularly for real work, and it does 
> > precisely what I want as I want.
>
> I also use for real work, but this particular grump I found quite helpful. 
> As a matter of fact, I also should report the current problems I have with 
> Dia in order help make it better in the future.

Well, without complainers nobody ever gets pushed to doing anything.  Of
course, more people to push might work better, but ...

> My pet peaves at the moment are as follows:
>
> * Feature request?
>    I'd really like to be able to label a colour, e.g. lets say I'd like
>    to call a red color "power". Then I'd like to use the "power" colour for
>    various lines. Eventually I then discover that the red colour wasn't
>    quite right (perhaps because some of the lines don't show up well
>    because of the colour of some background). What I'd really like to
>    be able to do at this point is to change the definition of the "power"
>    colour and have all power lines change their colour accordingly.
>
>    This can of course be extended to various attributes, so I'd really like
>    to be able to define a logical set of attributes that I can then apply
>    to different objects.
>
>    I don't suppose this is already possible?

Nope.  Doing it for colors would not be horribly hard, that'd just be
adding a "Name" field to the color type and have a hash table for that
in the diagram, and some way to name it, and store it in the savefile.
Doing it for arbitrary attributes would be a different ballgame,
requiring somewhat of a framework for them.  It's been mentioned before,
I believe.

> * Bug?
>    It is annoying that the state of the 'snap to grid' setting isn't
>    preserved when you open a saved diagram. What's more annoying is that
>    for some reason the "dynamic grid" option also keeps being set, so
>    when I do enable 'snap to grid', things no longer snap as they should...

Yes, that's all part of the "store view in file" package.
Unfortunately, other concerns are currently more pressing.  It has been
reported.

> * Feature request?
>    Sometimes I draw a line in a diagram representing two things, let's
>    say power and ethernet (yes, they can be combined if you are using
>    something like PowerLine Communications). If power is red, and ethernet
>    is green, I'd like to draw a line that's alternatingly red and green.
>    Is this possible somehow?

That's not been requested before.  It could be hacked in put painting
two lines, one green and one dashed red over it.  Or maybe (if the
dashes can be controlled well enough) just two dashed lines.  But it's
not quite trivial.

> I'll try to remember other things as I come across them. Finally I'd just 
> like to say that I'm really grateful for Dia, and 0.95.1 for Windows is a 
> huge improvement over 0.94!

There's some rather significant improvements, yes.

-Lars