Re: About Dia shapes

[thomas harding laposte net (Thomas Harding)]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 12:56:13PM +0200, Mathieu Bridon (bochecha) wrote:
> Jean just sent me an archive containing a reworked version for the
> icons.
>
> This should help as now, the icons are much better cut, thus the only
> problem should be that lines and shapes do not join exactly.

I spent about height hours to reproduce the desktop computer, and was
unable to join exactly the lines :)

> I would like to help, but I have absolutely no idea how to do that, and
> I have never worked with SVG before...

You can use Inkscape or another program to do the job. You can also
write the forms by hand, but only for simple shapes (eg, composed only
from lines, squares and arcs), because hand-writing beziers lines will
give you headashes ;p.

Some tips about dia:
 * It do not supports gradients -- there was gradients in the
   hw_computer.svg you given below.
 * It do not handle "transform".

So,
 * create a new svg file with your svg editor, save it
 * edit it, change the viewport to smth more suitable for fine
   grain-tuning (eg: 0 0 400 400)
 * re-open it with the svg editor, draw...
 * do not move or transform grouped elements, or ungroup them
   once it is done (to avoid "transform" element)

Once you'll have written/edited the svg, edit it by hand. Especially,
change "px" stroke-width to no unit.

If you have graphcsmagick or imagemagick, you can use "display" command
to have a fine-grained view (especially if you setted large enough width
and height attribute of the top-level "svg" element).

Once you are satisfied, copy the svg file to a .shape file extension.

In the shape file, you will change "stroke" to "default"
or "foreground"  -- I forgotten to do that yesderday, and typed it as "black".
will correct... -- this will allow users to change it.

* You'll find SVG specifications at http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/
* You'll find shape specifications in chapter 11 of the Dia
  documentation.

> Anyway, here is the new version of the set. Hope it will be useful.
> ftp://91.121.156.173/pub/hardware.zip

A new resource is /Always/ useful, if correctly exxploited.

-- 
Thomas Harding