On 02/08/2010 05:24:18 PM, Hans Breuer wrote: > At 08.02.2010 23:29, Karl O. Pinc wrote: > > I've a png image, from a gimp xcf, that I'd like > > to use as an object in Dia.
> Unfortunately the old website has a highly outdated copy of the > custom-shapes document. The most recent version is available via: > http://git.gnome.org/browse/dia/tree/doc/custom-shapes Cool. Thanks. > > Is there a way to use an arbitrary image in dia? > > > Yes, instead of following the documentation you could try to export > as > > shape instead, there is no need for the round-trip to Inkscape. I upgraded to 0.97 from backports.org (whether I needed to or not) and have no problem making a shape. Thanks. But... > > The particular image I'm interested in has > > transparency, which may be yet another issue. > > Is there any support for this? > > > Yes, full support as far as I know. Transparency looks good on the dia screen, but not when exported to pdf. The cairo export to pdf does funny things to the color map (it seems) on the transparent portions of the shape. Printing the resultant pdf in black and white looks fine but the colors that appear when the pdf is displayed on the screen are 8-bit-ish, and wrong. I tried upgrading to libcairo2 1.8.8, again from backports.org, and this did not solve the problem. Neither did putting a white filled rectangle behind the transparent shape or a white rectangle shape I made from a png. Exporting to eps (using pango fonts) and then using epstopdf makes the transparent shape look right, but the transparency is lost and anything behind the shape is obscured with white. Humm... What seems to work is exporting (via cairo) to ps and then using ps2pdf (in the ghostscript package) to convert to pdf. After testing it seems that it does not matter whether libcairo2 is upgraded or not. (Note: the cairo ps export option is not available in stock Lenny.) I notice that regardless of the libcairo2 version the resultant pdf has a flaw. A line "coming out from behind" a transparent region is shifted up 1 pixel at the transition in the pdf. > > I'm running dia 0.96.1 on Debian Lenny (5.4). Any comments? Should I be sending a bug to someone? Who? Karl <k...@meme.com> Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward." -- Robert A. Heinlein _______________________________________________ dia-list mailing list dia-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dia-list FAQ at http://live.gnome.org/Dia/Faq Main page at http://live.gnome.org/Dia
