Re: The process of making custom shapes

["Marcel Toele" <dpy dia gmail com>]

Dia's custom shapes support a subset of SVG, so not everything that inkscape can do can be rendered by dia. However, with a little care you can use inkscape to author .svg file that can be turned into .shape files.

For the company I work, for I have written a small script that will convert a directory of .svg files into a set of shapes with accompanying sheet. It's a bit rudimentary and may not work in all cases. If you are interested I can ask if it can be shared with this mailing list.

cheers,

Marcel

PS

One problem that you will encounter using this path, unfortunately,
will be the authoring and placement of the connection points. For this
I use a "special" marker object in the SVG that can be easily
duplicated and authored by inkscape as well (although the marker has to
be copied from an existing template, it's not easily possible to create
it from scratch). But hopefully more on this later.

2008/1/8, 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.
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