Re: re. Negative Space
- From: Michael Ross <michael e ross gmail com>
- To: discussions about usage and development of dia <dia-list gnome org>
- Subject: Re: re. Negative Space
- Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2011 20:16:19 -0400
TSD,
You are making more of this than is necessary.
The diagram origin where x and y are 0 is essentially arbitrary. You do not need to concern yourself with it. If you draw in the negative space as you call it you will be crossing page breaks and for Dia to print it will have to print a page wherever you have drawn things. It is not a problem as far as I know - draw wherever you like. There is no importance to the origin that I know of. If you like you can always draw with positive numbers on the ruler, that will work too.
If you want all your work to be on on single pages, then never cross a page break line and arrange your work on adjacent pages within the marked areas. (You can draw right up to the page breaks because the margins will be added when you print.) If you want to draw north and south, east and west of the first page it will make no difference - except maybe the pagination will be unknown until you try it. (I have never experimented with the pagination, and it sounds like there may be some odd behavior.)
But if you cross a page break line Dia will have to put the work on two pages when it is time to print.
Here is the drill.
Start a Dia and set up how you want the pages - paper size, landscape or portrait, and how much margin you want to show on the printed page.
The page breaks will be at the dimensions of the printed area you have described.
Zoom in to a single page and start drawing. If you want it all on one page - a normal thing to want, then don't draw across the page break lines.
If you want a little more room, you can revisit the page set up and change the scale. A smaller scale means what you have drawn will be scaled smaller relative the the page size.
If you didn't take up the whole page then you can scale the drawing up to better fill the page.
Suppose you have given up on the idea of all the Dia on one single letter size page. You can choose a larger page size - say B size which is two portrait letter pages side by side.
You just change it and the page breaks are reconfigured according to the scale and margins you have set. Your Dia will probably not be in exactly the placement you like so you move things around in the B size printed area (margins not shown), don't cross the page breaks and it will all print out on one B size page.
Suppose you now have a Dia that is huge or so detailed that it will be hard to read. Now you can simply scale it to fit over as many pages you want - without any regard to the numbers on the ruler. When you print Dia will break it up into the exact pages shown by the page breaks. The printed pages will have the material from within the page breaks outlined by the exact margins you specified. If your printer will do it you could probably have no margins at all. But forget that, it you print this huge Dia that covers many pages you can simple take your transparent tape or glue stick and piece all the individual pages together into a single poster.
This is all very interesting, but it never really comes up for the work I do with Dia. For a project I may draw all over the Dia work area. The first page might have a graph from an image in another program. Then I annotate that, then I create a new image of a graph where the test was changed, then I may start to add narrative about the difference in tests. I might move below or above and put together a functional block diagram, to the right is a flow chart, there might be some more images of test apparatus or photographic evidence from the testing. I might have an areas that just contains handy shapes I have created that I want to copy elsewhere. I might create a layers and overlay mark ups that can be toggled on and off.
I do this with no concern for how printing will turn out because I hardly ever use Dia for printing. I usually compose a printed page from some elements of the overall diagram, and do a screen dump when I like it. I will take that as a jpg and add it to Open Office docs, or webpages. More often than not I never print anything.
Frequently, I take these screen dumps into Inkscape where I can create transparent overlays. Sometime I have to work with scanned images that are mishapen and I use Gimp to deform them into a rectangular shape and combine them in Inkscape with other visual elements, or a screen dump then back into Dia for annotation.
On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 12:09 PM, Steffen Macke
<dia diagramr biz> wrote:
Hi,
On 08/02/2011 05:36 PM, Tech Support Department wrote:
Now you're just confusing me. I thought it was already clarified that only the space between the main lines was printed because that's where the page breaks. Are you saying that there is a partial page breaking before the zero line, and that will print out as well?
Which Dia version are you referring to? Note that e.g. Dia master has at least one pagination bug fix
compared to Dia 0.97.1.
--
"The hedge fund managers of America are getting lower tax rates than physics professors or cab drivers.
That is demented." -- Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway
Michael E. Ross
(919) 550-2430 Land
(919) 631-1451 Cell
(919) 513-0418 Desk
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