Re: Dia Test-Run

[Lars Clausen <lars raeder dk>]

On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 15:22, Ben Gillis wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am giving Dia a test run; it is very, very nice to see something out 
> there that can replace Visio.  (I have been a Visio user since 1994, and 
> MS has all but destroyed it with poor quality, bugs I never saw until MS 
> acquired it).

Interesting... I haven't used Visio really ever, so I can't say.

> I am looking to replace MS Visio as my primary drawing tool for software 
> development projects; mostly used for drawings, UML diagrams and such. 
> However, in order to do that, I am going to have to be able to pull off 
> a few things with whatever drawing tool I use.
> 
> I realize this is an open source, pre 1.0 release (and job well done so 
> far, I might add ;-)  There are a couple of questions I have about it, 
> hoping someone might be able to answer:
> 
> 1. Text in Shapes - I can't seem to select a shape, type, and have text 
> show up in the shape.  Rather, I have to explicitly overlay the shape w/ 
> text from the Text Tool.  Am I doing something wrong?  (I can't find any 
> text-based properties for the shape; should I assume text is not an 
> attribute of a shape in this 0.93 release?)

Some shapes come with text in them (see the first four Flowchart shapes,
for instance), some have text set via attributes (UML Class is one), and
some just don't have text.

> 2. Programming APIs - will I be able to write programs/scripts to parse 
> the drawings, like Visio offers?  A scripting way to do so (like Visio's 
> VBA, or third-generation language (preferred, actually) like C or C++ 
> would be fantastico.  Is that in the works?  Available?

There is Python scripting available, thanks to Hans Breuer, and the file
format is XML, so is easy to work on outside Dia, see the links section
on our web page.

-Lars