Re: Dia New features request

[Lars Ræder Clausen <lars raeder dk>]

On Thu, 2009-04-16 at 08:06 +0200, Philippe Donnet wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> I just discover Dia (0.97-pre2), so easy to use, fast, intuitive ...
> wonderful,
>  
> I would love to find those features, maybe it does exist, if yes would
> you be kind to tell me where/how.
>
> - rotate function (on rectangles or boxes, and of course all other
> elements) - HIGH PRIORITY

High priority, high difficulty. This would require some fairly
significant changes in how objects, handles, connection points,
rendering and autolayout is done. Nobody has so far had the time to do
this, or the money to pay somebody to do it. Everybody keeps asking for
it, though, including me:)

> - select all (or part of) layers together, if i like to move all the
> elements of a drawing

In principle this is easy, but we'd have to consider how it affects all
the various things one can do with selected elements, which for instance
now includes moving them up/down layers.

> - import dxf (real architect drawings, quite big size (100-200MB)
> doesn't work

This is 

> - drawing vertical or horizontal lines while keeping CTRL or ALT or
> any other key, to guarantee that the line is horiz. or vert.

CTRL already restricts movement of the cursor to horiz/vert when
resizing/moving, but it would be sneaky to have it do so when drawing to
force the initial line to horiz/vert. I usually have been using the grid
for that.

> - to be able to give a value for length and with from a rectangle,
> same for a line or circle

Almost got implemented, but we'd need to add some way to update the
properties dialog when an object changes (e.g. you have the dialog open
and then you resize the object). That requires a bit of infrastructure
that hasn't been made yet.

-Lars