Re: XFig vs. dia 5:1

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Sun, 14 Jul 2002, ml@knorke.in-berlin.de wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> thanks for your explanations.
> 
> On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 11:08:09AM -0500, Lars Clausen wrote:
>> No, Dia does not have hatches.  We're more geared towards structured
>> diagrams than vector art.  It is a good suggestion, though.
> 
> I see hatches mostly essential for technical diagrams, not
> as a part of vector art.  Ideally, the hatches should be
> very flexible (colour, line style, angle, distance between
> lines, ...).

Making any hatching would be a start, but I could see a fairly flexible
system with some kind of 'hatch picker' like the color picker.

>> 0.88.1 was quite unstable.  0.90 is much better.
> 
> Yes, dia becomes definitely more and more stable.
> Unfortunately, I had data losses on dia crashes.  How about
> an "auto-save" feature like in Emacs?

I was thinking of that at some point, but didn't get around to it.  Tied in
with the undo stack and an idle timer it should be fairly easy.

>> > functions are already there (but I did find them), or maybe
>> > one could port good ol' XFig to GTK+? :-)
>> 
>> That's been done:
>> <URL:http://k332.feld.cvut.cz/~lemming/projects/gtkfig.html>
> 
> This project seems to be not very active (last version 0.7.x
> of 1999) and more a rewrite than a port. 

Well, I haven't tried it.

> Anyway, I didn't mean this too serious, and of course, the "XFig vs. dia"
> wasn't meant as a fight, more as a productive competition.

It is certainly a good idea to get inspiration from each other.  I used to
use XFig, but I found the interface too cumbersome, so I switched to Dia.

-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?