Lars, Cyrille, Hans, and Dia developers and users I'm writing this message as a first attempt to regularly summarize some of what has being going on with Dia for the past week/month or perhaps longer. I intend to summarize some of the recent dicussions on the mailing list and try to look at some of the thing that have been mentioned in the Changelog but present them in a slightly more reader friendly format and try to highlight all the things that Dia is good at. I wont summarize everything and please bear with me at first until I get over my own bias and get the hang of writing about of what people are generally interested in.
If I can get in the habit of doing this regularly I will start posting it to places like GnomeDesktop.org and try and generate a bit more awareness of how great Dia is. There are of course plenty of other more useful things I could and probably should be doing for Dia (like updating the FAQ or user manual) but I want to write more regularly and see if it is something I can be good at. * Table of Contents Dia Users Poll Dia used for Book Illustrations Dia XML Document Types and DTDs Tips and Tricks Bug and Enhancement Summary ** Dia Users Poll http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2004-February/msg00094.html Lars Clausen has put up what is hopefully the first of many Polls to help find out more about what Dia users want. The first poll is a vote about 'Arrow Length' http://raeder.dk/~larsrc/Dia/LittlePoll/index.php ** Dia used for Book Illustrations http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2004-February/msg00067.html Gerard Milmeister, co-author of a new book "Comprehensive Mathematics for Computer Scientists" published by Springer Verlag http://www.springeronline.com/ kindly told us that he has used Dia to produce over seventy illustrations for the book. The quality EPS (Encapsulated Postscript) output and ability to include Pango fonts in the export helped make this possible. Also the convenient arrow head support was particulary needed for the task. "I created some 70+ illustration, and Dia was the only open-source program adequate for this task." It is always nice to hear about success stories like these and other kind words from another appreciative user http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2004-February/msg00048.html ** Dia XML Document Types and DTDs Another interested user wants to generate Dia compatible documents and is seeking a description of the XML format used by Dia http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2004-February/msg00087.html The Document Type Definition for the Dia Diagrams (.dia) is inlcuded with the Dia source code and available from the CVS Repository. http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/dia/doc/diagram.dtd ** Tips and Tricks Want to Change the Fonts or other properties of mulitple objects at once? http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2004-February/msg00059.html There is a convenient workaround, just Select and group the objects, change desired properties and then ungroup. For those who are interested the thread also discusses why this problem has been difficult to fix and there is a link to the relevant bug report. Want to select lots of small items that are inside a larger item? Lars explains how: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2004-February/msg00042.html ** Bug and Enhancement Summary There are at the time of writing the following reports against Dia (all data is approximate, and I'm pretty sure it changed while I was making this report) : 6 UNCONFIRMED http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=dia&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED 193 NEW http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=dia&bug_status=NEW 35 ASSIGNED http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=dia&bug_status=ASSIGNED 63 NEEDINFO http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=dia&bug_status=NEEDINFO 12 REOPENED http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=dia&bug_status=REOPENED 308 Reports in total. of which 119 are marked as Enhancements. Hopefully I can get things a bit more organised and graph this into something more informative. If there is some other Bug information that you think would be more useful then please feel free to make suggestions. Older news that I worth mentioning again is that a Overview Navigation widget as seen in the GIMP is now available in Dia for those willing to grab CVS and give it a try. Corrections and clarifications welcome. If you dont think I should try to do this at all then that too is a fair opinion and I'll take it under advisement. Sincerely Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/~horkana/ Dia Home Page http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/ Dia Mailing list archives http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/ _______________________________________________ Dia-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dia-list FAQ at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/faq.html Main page at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia
