Diagram footer

[christian ridderstrom gmail com]

The diagrams I create at work must have a footer with information about 
the diagram. This is typically information such as:

* Title         - E.g. "Satellite system block diagram"
* ID            - Drawing ID, e.g. "SMX-nnn" (a "series" and a number)
* Revision      - E.g. 'A' or '2'
* Date          - Date when diagram was created
* Rev. date     - Date of last revision (i.e. last modification)
* Description   - Description of the drawing
* Location of diagram file, e.g. a file path, a URI or a repository path.
* Company logotype

Today I've simply drawn a few lines, added text and grouped the whole 
thing on a separate layer. When creating a drawing, I base it on a 
template with this grouped object and manually add the information.

There ought to be a better way of doing this...

I thought about creating[*] a custom shape that is a drawing footer, 
however: What will happen if I create a custom shape that is a drawing 
footer, then use this shape in a drawing and finally open it it in another 
installation of Dia?

In addition, a lot of the information in the footer is really meta-data of 
the drawing and it should be possible to extract it automatically. At the 
very least, this holds for:
* The file name and path of the drawing
* Date of last modification

So, getting to the point. How have others solved this problem?

Best regards
/Christian

[*] I did try to create my own shape, but I couldn't figure out how to add 
several text fields to it.

--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr