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

[Pierre-Louis Bonicoli <pierre-louis bonicoli gmx fr>]

On 08/09/2011 13:49, Andreas Spindler 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. 

Hi !

just a quick response :)

As an experienced programmer and a specialist, you should know that more
informations are needed in order to get some help (Interesting reading:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html). What versions of
windows/Dia are you using ?

> Nothing can be changed or aligned.

Did you try the Objects->Align menu ? It's mentioned in the tutorial
available here http://projects.gnome.org/dia/diatut/all/all.html#L015
and in the manual available here
http://dia-installer.de/doc/en/objects-chapter.html#aligning-objects

> 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 can not reproduce: using properties dialog box of a "standard - Text"
object i am able to modify the size of font.

> 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.

So i can not reproduce problems you encounter using dia 0.97.1 (with
Linux or Windows).

> This is one of these programs where I 
> ask myself: "Are the
> programmers really use this themselves?"

Maybe you should try to fix one of bugs you described: write a patch and
then become a programmer who was first an user :) Or maybe you could do
nothing in order to improve (as a developper, yes you can!) what you
think is wrong and continue to whine /o\

Pierre-Louis