Re: General usage of the Dia tool

[Alejandro Imass <aimass yabarana com>]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 6:59 AM, Sarath Sivasankaran Nair
<sarath verificationpartner com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Please excuse me If this issue has already been spoken about previously. I
> did try searching upon this topic but failed to find something and so this
> post.
>
> I have been trying to figure out if the Dia tool is based only on the GUI or
> if there is an option to code whatever diagram we want and use the Dia tool
> to generate diagrams by giving the required code as input.
>
> Could you please tell me what kind of code is supported if this feature is
> available and what the syntax for creation would and also how to run them
> from command line.

I don't know of any programatic interfaces to create diagrams with Dia
but it doesn't mean they don't exist. But you can certainly create the
equivalent Dia XML files and have Dia read those and they will turn
into images. The native Dia file format is nothing more than gziped
XML so if you uncompress a .dia file you can see the XML. I don't know
if the schema is published somewhere or if an XSD exists.

If you give more context on what you're trying to accomplish maybe we
can help you better. It sounds to me you may want to look at
generating SVG instead which has thousands of programatic interfaces
including ones that run on JavaScript because most browsers today can
render SVG directly. Again, it will all depend on what you want to
accomplish.


-- 
Alejandro Imass