Re: dia-list Digest, Vol 170, Issue 1

[Ron Wilson <wilsonronl gmail com>]

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 8:00 AM, <dia-list-request gnome org> wrote:

Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2018 17:15:29 +0100
From: Marco van Beek <marco 84andahalf com>
Subject: Forking and building a new version of dia

Hi,

I am a regular user of dia, and am saddened that it is slowly decaying as a project.

I have an idea that might help create a new version with functionality not found in any other system.

I have been documenting a fairly large system and realised how quickly the diagrams will go out of date, just because cables get moved, and so on.

So it occurred to me that given the xml data format, it should be reasonably easy to come up with a client-server version, using an API on a standard LAMP/WAMP server.

An interesting idea.

Alternative suggestion:

Dia supports import of SVG diagrams.

GraphViz (graphviz.org) generates network graphs from connectivity descriptors. It can output the generated graph in SVG format.

Define a report for your database that outputs the node connections as a DOT file, then process the DOT file with Graphviz.

Alternately, Graphviz has scripting APIs for Guile, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and TCL which could automate extraction of information from your database and generation of the graph, saving the result as SVG.

Once you have the SVG, import it to Dia for any manual editing.