Re: Diagram or similar that shows all shapes?

[christian ridderstrom gmail com]

On Wed, 8 Nov 2006, Lars Clausen wrote:

> > It certainly is way more than I'd like... it ends up being 36 pages.
> > Anyway, I thought I send it to you somehow, any preferences?
>
> Mail it to me at lars raeder dk, not to the mailing list. 

I used my head and simply put it here:

        http://www.md.kth.se/~chr/dia

so you or anyone else on this list can simply get it. Oh, the drawing now 
uses A4-pages instead of Letter.

> Did you end up doing it manually?

Yes :-(

I had to tweak quite a bit to get the shapes to fit within a small set of 
pages, so not all shapes are in their "original" size. Btw, I wouldn't 
recommend doing this again... it's quite a bit of work.

If you were to do it manually again, I strongly recommend doing one cheat 
sheet for each category of shapes. If Dia can included other .dia-files, 
it'll be quite easy to then create a composite document with all the 
pages.

It's probably much more practical to automatically generate a document 
like this. Things might be simplified if we create one document for each 
category of shapes though.

But above all, what I miss are explanations about the shapes. It's quite 
difficult to look at a cheat sheet and see that this block actually 
accepts several arguments that let you attach text to it.

As an aside, I was pleasantly surprised to find zig-zag lines that you can 
attach text to. That's something I've been looking for:-)

A few comments:

* I still think each shape needs a help/documentation field or similar.  
  (I've written about this in a separate post, so let's talk about it 
  there).

* Being able to automatically generate these documents, and also place the 
  name of the shape below would be really useful. Maybe even genereate
  is a web page?

* Something that was quite annoying is that some shapes take up a much 
  larger area than they appear to do on screen. Something that happened 
  frequently was that I got one or two extra blank pages, simply because a 
  shape extended invisibly to the next page.  The connection point is
  a good example of this. A very small thing on screen compared to the
  extent it has.

** Maybe it'd be nice if there was an option to display the "extent" of
   all the shapes? (Or maybe the shapes should be changed to not have
   such large extents).  

* In one case Dia reported a certain number of pages, but when printing
  to Adobe PDF I actually got more pages.

* Why are the shapes so big by default?  Take the 'circuit shapes' for 
  instance, I can't imagine that anyone actually use them in that size?

* I really missed a method for aligning objects in an array format.
  Something where you select a bunch of objects, click 'aling in array'
  and then enter 3x5 (row x column) and the objects are aligned 
  accordingly.

* I got fooled by the 'align spread out horizontaly', as it takes all the 
  selected objects and aligns them. Since I'd selected objects on 
  different "rows", they were all spread out instead of this being done
  "row-wise".  (I realize that some kind of threshold value is needed in 
  order to determine which objects belong to a row).

* Is there some way to figure out what the keyboard shortcuts are for
  the different commands? (Assuming that commands without a shown
  keyboard shortcut actually has one). Alternatively, is there a way
  to assign your own keyboard shortcuts?

* I'd prefer being able to move objects around on screen using the
  keyboard in certain cases. (Other drawing software lets you do this
  using the arrow keys for instance. Is this possible in Dia?).

> > One thing that really bugged me was that sometimes things didn't quite 
> > fit on a page, so a whole row or column of additional pages were added 
> > in the printout. It'd be really good if Dia could somehow show which 
> > pages actually have some content on them.
>
> That's an interesting idea.  Have the content-less 'pages' greyed out or
> something.  Only problem is, the pages are fully virtual, just lines on
> the canvas.  Figuring out which pages are empty would require running a
> non-trivial amount of code -- though it could be made to work.

Maybe there could be a "preview"-command or "preview-mode" where pages 
that will be printed are shown differently? (Thicker line?) 

Another option would be to have the code checking what pages that will be 
printed to be exectued when using the command 'Redraw'. (There should be a 
keyboard shortcut for that command btw).

> > In addition, I frequently used the File->Page setup menu to find out how 
> > many pages Dia thought was used. That information might be nice to have in 
> > the status bar.
> >
> > In addition, it seems that the page count isn't always updated when 
> > turning the display of a layer on/off.
>
> That appears to be a bug.  Seems like changing the visibility of layers
> should force a recompute but doesn't.  If you try to make a layer
> invisible, then change something in the diagram, you can see the update.

Yes, I did notice that if I moved something then the page count was 
updated.  I think 'Redraw' should force a recount, but it doesn't do that 
today.

Let me know which of the above ideas etc you feel should be entered into 
bugzilla, and I'll see if I can enter them. (Possibly after further 
separate discussions).

Best regards
/Christian

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