Re: Dia [Mathcad, Copy and Paste]

[Hans Breuer <hans breuer org>]

Hi John,
to discuss matters of Dia it is best to subscribe to the dia mailing list.
Otherwise your message might stay in the moderator queue for quite some while.

Am 27.10.2014 um 23:47 schrieb Sheehan, John T:
> Hi folks, my name is John Sheehan and I am a software developer. Tim
> (cc'ed here) and I are looking at Dia as a sketch tool to recommend to
> our customers. Our product is Mathcad and our clients (engineers of
> every discipline)  live on free body diagrams. We're not going to build
> a sketcher, and then there is Dia, perfect we tell our customers to use
> Dia and all are happy. Except one wrinkle,  getting images from Dia to
> Mathcad means exporting as PNG and then loading from disk, repeat
> process on every change.
The current development version has improved support for copy and paste, 
see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336304

> My idea is I would like to add clip board interoperability to Dia. Then
> Dia users could Cntrl-C from Dia and Cntrl-V everywhere else, Like
> MS-Word, MS-PowerPoint or Mathcad. I am getting confused trying to find
> the source code. Websites say the source code is publicly available but
> I have not found it.
See https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia/Development

> So two quick questions : 1.) Is there any reason why clip board
> interoperability wouldn't work?
As discussed in bug 336304 the main quest is finding a good common 
interchange format preferably vector based. The best cross-platform choice 
would be SVG, but that's limited with some applications, see e.g.:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/dia/commit/?id=10a3da6272bc91d32d77e4ff7df6ff49d0395002

An issue still open is the handling of layers. Given that Edit/Copy works 
on the current selection this is no good mechanism to exchange a multiple 
layer diagram via clipboard.
Dia 0.97.x on Windows has Edit/Copy Diagram, but that's limited by some 
interpretation differnces on WMF/EMF.

> 2.) Is the source code publicly available?
Yes. https://git.gnome.org/browse/dia/

> I hope we can do something together, Dia looks amazing.
Thanks,
        Hans

-------- Hans "at" Breuer "dot" Org -----------
Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to
get along without it.                -- Dilbert