Re: How to add a shape to Dia, step-by-step

["Steffen Macke" <sdteffen gmail com>]

Hi,

> > Looks good. Figure 3 is a duplicate of Figure 2, but I think you
> > meant to have a picture of the dialog specifying shape icon size?

Sorry for this and thanks for noting. The figure was there, but
reference was wrong (stupid copy/paste).

> A question: when one exports a diagram to get a shape. the dialog for .png
> offers 22 for at least one of the sizes, many times it is the height, but
> some other times it is the width. Wouldn't be better to accept what dia offers
> in order to get same aspect?.

I guess that depends on the taste. I would always try to get 22x22
icons. However,
there might be things where this is not feasible. Getting nice icons
is anyhow tricky.
I tend to add the new created shape, set its line width to 2, export
to PNG and do
some editing in GIMP. (Unfortunately, this requires more skills than
the simple effort
described in the current tutorial).

> Another question: Would it be convenient to explain how to change the .shape
> file to get: fewer connection poins;  a "main" connection point;  a textbox,etc ?

I think such information has been added recently to the Dia Manual
(11.2 Shapes).
However, this requires quite different skills than the ones in my
tutorial (XML editing,
not just clicking around). Of course, it would be good to combine both things.
It's both DocBook, so it shouldn't be too difficult:

http://dia-installer.de/howto/create_shape/dia_create_shape.xml

Steffen