Re: custom shapes and lines

[Allan Eising <allan eising+gmane gmail com>]

On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:21:26 +0100, Edheldil wrote:

> Steffen Macke wrote:
> > Hi Allan,
> >
> > sorry for the late reply.
> >   
> > > When I include my newly defined shape, some how dia overrides the
> > > borders of each and every rectangle within the shape, making them
> > > follow the properties of the object itself. This adds an ugly black
> > > border even to places where no border should be.
> > >     
> > >     
> > The shape export often exports areas and their border twice (because
> > that's the way
> > Dia renders things). If you're able to read/edit the XML of your
> > shapes, you could try to
> > remove e.g. the border.
> >   
> Hi,
>
> another reason for duplicated lines is for example rectangle with even
> minutely rounded corners - Dia will place two rectangles and some arcs.
>
> For these reasons I think that creating shapes by mere saving from Dia
> without extensive external editing produces suboptimal shapes - they
> will contain lots of cruft which unnecessarily complicates the shape and
> creates problems with changing attributes.
>
> Reading and editing Dia shape's XML is (relatively) easy, always prune
> the weed from them before publishing the shape! This also allows you to
> assign user-changeable colors and line widths.
>
> Edheldil

Hello,

Steffen, Edheldil, thank you very much for your replies. 

I don't think there's much doubt that I need to edit the .shape file. I 
went through it today, and there's a lot to be cleaned up if I want to 
use it as a real stencil. So thank you for that suggestion.

However, it would be a really helping feature to have in the future, if 
you could actually avoid this editing. Of course control points will be 
sprayed all over your shape if you built it in Dia, but the border issue 
I believe could be fixed somehow, allowing you to convert a drawing to a 
shape and keep the look it has. 

I guess it isn't a high-priority issue for the developer's community, but 
it's a nice to have feature none the less.

Just my two cents :)

Allan