Re: Dia in our enterprise

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Jean-Philippe Player wrote:

> Greetings,
>  
> I work in a start-up and have been using Dia for some time now, mainly
> for UML and flow chart design. Dia is a great tool, with all the
> flexibility and potential required to become our enterprise's official
> diagram software.
> 
> In our effort to move away from Windows, we have been looking for a
> replacement for Visio. Dia is the obvious choice, being open and easily
> extendable. We have been evaluating Dia for two months now, first v0.86
> then v0.88.1. Our conclusion is that Dia is mature, but still needs a few
> tweaks to be fully usable. In fact, we would need a v1.0 stable
> release. To this end, even though we are quite new to the Dia code, we
> would like to contribute to the Dia project, either in terms of code or
> in terms of graphics (shapes etc.).

You shall certainly be welcome to contribute.  The more you contribute, the
more Dia is the way you want.

> All machines we use are x86 with Mandrake 8.0. (linux 2.4.12, glibc22)
> Here is the list of all our remarks and feature requests:
> 
> Critical priority:
> 
>  - Loading/Saving Several times, we have experienced problems in
> reloading our diagrams, mostly errors on connexion points. Once, the
> diagram was completely unusable.

There have been some internationalization problems, but that should (I
believe) have been fixed with 0.88.1.  If you can show us one of the
unusable diagrams, we can probably figure out the problem.

>  - Error recovery Our main concern is stability. We cannot afford to lose
> work (This is why we went to Linux in the first place). Error recovery
> could be an autosave file which can be loaded in place of the damaged
> diagram( in case of a segfault for example).

An autosave file would be good, indeed.  

>  - Stable features only In v0.86, anti-aliasing could crash Dia. It would
> be nice to be able to choose at compile time to only include stable
> features with a flag (--enable-stable ?). Selecting the 'Help' menu also
> crashed Dia once, but we don't know why ..

Basically a single switch to turn off all experimental options.  I think
we've been bad on marking unstable things as such in configure.

>  - Flowchart sheet The flowchart sheet of v0.86 and v0.88.1 has two
> glitches which makes it unusable in production.  * The diamond shape
> resizes both horizontally (good) and vertically (bad!). We use instead
> the diamond of SDL.  * We also need an arrow to link the different
> shapes; we use the UML message arrow.  These two shapes (diamond and
> arrow) need to be part of the flowchart sheet.  (We have already modified
> this sheet internaly, we will send it to the developers).

Cool!  Thank you.

> Features:
> 
>  - Read/Write in an archive This may sound strange, but it would be nice
> for Dia (and other software) to be able to read/write files into a
> tar[.gz] archive. Reason for this is that large documents contain many
> files, amoung which Dia diagrams, postcript pictures, lyx files etc. One
> archive containing all these documents would simplify a lot the
> management work a user has to do today: we must create a folder for each
> new lyx document and place in it all the dia diagrams.  If anyone has a
> better solution, please let me know.

Have you considered using CVS for project management?  Or is this a
different kind of problem?

>  - Rotation Rotation has already been discussed in the mailing list of
> Dia. It is a feature which we could have made use of, especially for
> text.

Yes, I fully agree.  It is at this time only a matter of design and
implementation, the previous hurdle of rotating text is gone.

> Extra features:
> 
>  - Graphic quality The graphic output quality is not critical, because
> Dia is a functional software. However, it wouldn't be bad to improve the
> general output. One possibility would be to diminish the default
> thickness of lines (thin lines look more professional). Also, there is a
> problem with the default size of the shapes: they are much too
> big. Almost all the shapes could be resized to a "reasonable" value as
> seen on a Letter or A4 page. This way, the canvas wouldn't have to be
> resised too much before printing.

There's a whole can of worms waiting to be opened there.  Varying line
thickness when scaling, placing arrow heads properly, making sure fonts
take up the right amount of space, all tricky problems.

>  - Mouse wheel The mouse wheel only scrolls when the pointer is on the
> scrollbar. It would be nice to scroll also on the canvas, perhaps in both
> directions( ie. wheel vertically, CTRL+wheel horizontally ).

True.

>  - Dynamic sheets Today, to add a new shape to a sheet, we need to edit
> by hand the sheet file. This is very powerfull: almost any shape can be
> obtained in this way. However, a simple mecanism to save a diagram into a
> shape and place it in a sheet from *inside* dia could be done. This is a
> feature present in Visio. One use we had for this is when we draw network
> packets: we cut and paste boxes with different gray backgrounds. For the
> time being, we keep them on a 'template' diagram.

Saving to a shape is there, it's now just a question of fixing the sheet.
Takes a bit of XML parsing, but it is absolutely doable.

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?