Re: Dia: Why is it so hard to do simple things?

[Michael Ross <michael e ross gmail com>]

Hi Andreas,

The blue lines in your image are page breaks.  They represent the area that will print on one page given the margins you have set.

If you draw all within the page break lines it will print on one page. 

If you draw across a page break line Dia will put the drawing on the printed pages according to how you crossed over.  

You could take these and tape them together into larger poster.  I learned to call that a segmented plot when using CAD programs, if that helps.

I have never tried to verify if font sizes are accurately shown, but there is certainly control for that via the properties of the text. (double click)

Since it is possible to scale the whole Dia I presume font sizes will be what you expect if the page scale is 100%.  

I am not sure how set a default font size.  Maybe someone will answer how to do that.

I am guessing this is how it would work: make text 12pt size on a 100 scale page.  The page gets too full of stuff, so you scale that page down to get a little more space - 75% let us say.

You don't have go around and change the font size of all the text - the font size will now be 3/4 times 12pt. 

Scale the page to get the contents to fill the page better, the fonts will increase accordingly.

Don't confuse view zooming with page scale.

I have explained some of this before and will append an earlier answer.

If you have more questions please ask.

Mike
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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.

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On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 7:49 AM, Andreas Spindler <info visualco de> wrote:

Hello,

just a quick note. I started to use Dia on Windows. As an exercise I tried to create an UML diagram.
After five minutes I had five boxes of different sizes, different font sizes. Nothing can be changed or aligned.
Dia just does something random. Sorry to say that, but after playing an hour with the program I found it only frustrating.

How can I get this diagram to be printed on one page, with equally sized boxes and the same font size? This seems
to be the least thing it should do for all diagram elements. I really like the  specific properties dialog boxes for the different UML types,
where I can edit operations and attributes. But the result is unusable. Please see the attached screenshot.

Or, what am I missing?

First I used "T" to create a title. The title is small, no possibility to make it bigger.
I created a class and a box popped on the screen, so huge, I couldn't even read it. Then I created another class,
and two others. All use different fonts. This is one of these programs where I ask myself: "Are the
programmers really use this themselves?"

--
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Dalai Lama 

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

Thomas A. Edison

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.
Warren Buffet

Michael E. Ross

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