Arrows

[Richard Rowell <rwrowell bellsouth net>]

I saw in the list archives there has been talk of re-working the currently 
hardcoded "arrows" into something more dynamic for some time (earliest 
reference I saw was back in 99).  However unless it is in the CVS, it doesn't 
appear any of these changes have made it...

I submitted a tiny patch yesterday with "crows feet" hacked in.  However I 
would really like to see a more flexible solution as well.  I don't think it 
would be incredibly hard to make it so the "arrows" are loaded (at startup?) 
from a config file (XML?).  The file I see would probably look like so:

<arrow category="ERD">
	<stroke type="line">
		<point>
			<x>17</x>
			<y>34</X>
		</point>
		<point>
			<x>34</x>
			<y>68</x>
		</point>
	</stroke>
	...
</arrow>

Arrows could have multiple "strokes" each stroke being whatever primitives 
GTK can work with (berziers, lines, poly-lines, etc).  The coordinate system 
would be such that 100 (or 1) would be the width/height of the triangles now. 
0,0 would be on the line between "from" and "to" exactly one arrow/height 
unit away from "to".

I will have some time to hack this weekend, so please let me know if this is 
a direction the project might like to go.

_________________________
Richard Rowell
rwrowell@bellsouth.net

If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves 
upon execution. - Robert Sewell