Re: Dia Shapes

[Alan Horkan <horkana tcd ie>]

> > I would like for us to have a Circuit Directory and divide the
> > subdirectories into a sensible order.
> > For now we may need to do something clunky in the GUI like circuits 1, 2
> > ... N or have a "Schematic Circuits" sheet (or or ... i hope you get the
> > gist) but hopefully later the GUI will have a way to nicely subcategorise
> > shapes.  I am really optimistic about Dia and think we need an
> > organised system that will still make some sense when we start having
> > hunderds of shapes.
>
> Alan, since we now have an actual gnome.org account, we can start thinking
> about a) migrating the web pages to gnome.org, and b) setting up an actual
> download area for shapes.  Right now, let's do this like we did the Cisco
> shapes, but yes, we need a treeview.
>
> >> Wow, this is beautiful!  I especially like the nicely colored icons.  We
> >> should do that for the other sheets as well, it makes them so much
> >> easier to navigate.  Thank you so much for this contribution!
> >
> > What was stopping me from using coloured shapes is that if you set a
> > colour value (rather than setting none, foreground, or background) then
> > users will be stuck with the colour you have choosen, unable to change
> > it.  I dont remember if i filed a bug report (i certainly i should have
> > done).
>
> Alan, you owe yourself to download these shapes and look at them.  It's not
> the shapes that are colored, it's the icons.  Colored so that similar
> shapes have similar colors.  It's not just pretty, it's darn usable.

I will certainly check them out this weekend.

I did mention before about prettying up Dia a bit and AFAIK the CVS
version has nice little icons in the menus and there are certainly loads
of icons that could be coloured,
I figure it wont be hard to allow users to override preset colours in a
shape.  I resigned/gave notice, so in just under a fortnight ill have the
time to put money where mouth is and get coding again.

If Dia does become much more colouful users will still probably want a way
to easily change the (colour) properties of objects across a whole
diagram and for example set all the lines to black and all the fill colour
to white to produce a clear printout or change the line and fill colours
to make a diagram look as if it came from rational rose (darkish red
lines, light yellow fill).
But im tired and rambling somewhat (more than usual :) and effectively
adding stylsheets to Dia diagrams and SVG would require me to serouisly
learn all those XML details i kept skimming over.

Later
Alan

still got a (metric) tonne of mail i have not read...