Re: Confused about diagram page sizing

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, Rick Horowitz wrote:
> Thanks for helping me out with my questions. I have a
> much better understanding now, but I have a couple of
> follow-up questions, below, if you'd be so kind as to
> reply once more.
[...]
> Questions about using the CVS version:
> 
> 1. I'm running Redhat 7.2, pretty much out-of-the box.
> Do you know if I'll need to upgrade gnome or any of
> the other dependencies of dia from what I am currently
> running, in or to run dia from CVS?

The only problem seems to be intltool, which is only in Rawhide for RH7.2.
It's available at
<ftp://ftp.rpmfind.net/linux/rawhide/1.0/i386/RedHat/RPMS/intltool-0.17-1.i386.rpm>, though.

> 2. I'm a novice Linux user. Is the dia build process
> straightforward and well documented?  If not, I'll
> probably not want to spend time with it and would
> appreciate knowing up-front.

The build process is straight-forward *if* you have all the necessary
developer libraries installed.  Check the FAQ
(<URL:http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia>) to see if you have them.  To
check what version you currently have, do e.g.

rpm -q libxml-devel

You'll of course also need to have a C compiler, as well as some devel
tools that are (should be:) default in RH:  autoconf, automake,
libtool... If you haven't done any compilation before, they may not be
there, though.  Documentation for compilation is in the INSTALL file.  As a
novice user, it is a valuable experience -- being able to compile from
sources reduces your dependency on RH (but opens up a can of worms of
having stuff installed from outside your package manager).

>> > 4. If I were to print from a diagram screen, would
>> I
>> > get a printed page for each "page" on the dia
>> diagram
>> > that I've drawn?  How can I get rid of all these
>> > excess empty dia pages?
>> 
>> By writing some logic to eliminate empty pages. 
> 
> Do you mean that there is a mechanism for a user to
> write such logic? Is this documented - what is it
> called? Or, are you suggesting that a developer of dia
> could write the required logic?

It'd be for a developer of Dia to write.

-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?