Re: dia consistency (look & feel of graphical elements)

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, Lars Clausen wrote:

> Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 16:24:37 -0500
> From: Lars Clausen <lrclause@cs.uiuc.edu>
> Reply-To: dia-list@gnome.org
> To: dia-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: dia consistency (look & feel of graphical elements)
>
> On 10 Sep 2003, debacle@knorke.in-berlin.de wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > being a CLI guy, I normally don't care very much about GUI
> > things.  However, while hacking on dia, I found some
> > look&feel inconsistencies, I don't understand.  Maybe,
> > somebody can explain this to me.
> >
> > First, the so-called "Assorted" elements are simpler than
> > one might expect.  E.g. there is way to add text or
> > connection points.  These elements are not as "professional"
> > as some other elements and should maybe not be shown in the
> > first section.  Why not just add them to the "Misc" section?
>
> They, like most other elements, are SVG shapes rather than programmed
> objects, and thus appear fairly primitive.  Alan, you have any comments?

They are very deliberately simple and as clean and clear as possible.
Hopefully at some point they we can replace most of my shapes.  I
certainly would like to be able to make it easier to draw things like a
perfect square/circle and the generic polygons I drew.

Text objects are for text, I don't think embedding a text object into
every shape is a good idea.

> > Second, the "Ciso" elements look very different from all
> > other elements.  Inverting all of them would make them more
> > "dia-like".  Many of the icons are much larger (e.g. 83x49)
> > than all other icons (22x22?), which looks not so good,

I very deliberately made all my icons the same size (if they are not 22x22
then they are 20x20).  It was a rather time consuming task, the icons
automatically generated by Dia are not square and the background is white
rather than transparent, and the black lines come up looking a bit grey so
I had to manually sharpen them up.

> > compared to the other sections.  Some elements are more or
> > less dupes.  E.g. the cloud is like the "Network" cloud, but
> > without the feature to hold text.  Why?

The sheets were put together independently, different authors wanted
different things.  Trying to reuse shapes across different set would be
hard to manage but not impossible to do.  It would be difficult.

> The Cisco elements were made automatically from figures published by Cisco
> themselves.  They do look funny, kinda like they could be inverted and look
> better, but that turns out not to be the case when you actually try it.
> Try for instance with the web_cluster icon.
>
> The icons ought to be resized, though some of them are going to be hard to
> understand at that size.

Some of the icons will just have to be drawn manually if they are to be
understadable.  Ideally the sheets would appear using a more standard file
widget that way we could have icon view, button view (what we currnetly
have) as well as a view with small text icons.  It might be good to have
larger icon views like 48x48 but that would not fit well within the
current toolbox, I think having the sheets in a seperate dockable window
from the main toolbox would be good.

If you are willing to help out with Dia please do but if you are a
programmer then code would be far more useful.  Documentation would be
pretty useful too.  I spent a really long time gettting the icons just
right for my Assorted shapes and they were still pretty simple,
considering Dia is a vector graphics program it might just be

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/