The process of making custom shapes

[Rek Jed <rekjed gmail com>]

Hi,

I work for a small open source consultancy in London and I'd like to pay 
an artist to draw some Dia shapes that I could use to make beautiful 
network diagrams with and ultimately release them to the public under a 
free license.

I read doc/custom-shapes and familiarized myself with the format.  
However it's not very clear to me how to go about creating shapes.  I 
assume that the shapes that come with Dia weren't coded by hand so is 
there anything that I can draw the shapes in (like Inkscape) and then 
convert them in to  shape files that can be easily imported in to dia?

I tried opening svg files with Dia and then saving them as shapes and 
that kind of works, but not as well as the original shapes.  For 
instance it isn't possible to change the colors or line thickness in the 
properties menu and Dia would often freeze when resizing the shape.  The 
shape file just refers to the original svg, which needs to be on the 
file system.  I have a feeling that this isn't very suitable for 
distribution.  I would greatly appreciate any advice on how to go about 
this.

Many thanks,


Rek.