Re: Dia - a rotate command?

[Lars Clausen <lars raeder dk>]

On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 16:00 -0500, D. Guido wrote:
> Hi Dia Developers,
>
>  
>
> My name is Guido and I work for a short line railroad in Fort Worth,
> Texas, USA.  I recently found Dia because I was in search of
> diagramming software for use in my engineering role.  I began using
> Dia and find it to be extraordinarily user-friendly with a clean
> interface and clean operation.  I would, however, like to know if Dia
> has a rotate command.  And if not I would like to know if Dia would
> consider developing a rotate command.  Specifically Iâd like to be
> able to rotate raster images as well as text elements.  Let me briefly
> explain why.

I'm afraid there's no rotate capability in Dia yet.  While many have
requested, including me, it is no trivial task due to having to handle
handles, connection points, rotation of groups and autorouting, and
having to add rotation to the exporters.

> My project involves making a schematic representation of our railroad
> tracks.  The process starts with someone hand-sketching an area of the
> railroad.  I can scan these into .tif or another graphics file format.
> Then I used the Dia image tool to bring them into a Dia sketch.  I can
> then draw âon topâ of the image to match the hand-sketch.  Iâd further
> like to ROTATE the image and add text and ROTATE the text to orient to
> the drawing elements be they curve or line.

An interesting application, but I cannot help but wonder if it wouldn't
be faster with one of the bitmap-to-vector converters available?

> See attached.  This shows a scanned-in hand sketch and the Dia drawing
> elements Iâve created.  You can see where it would be useful to add
> text to lines and curves.  It would also have been useful to rotate
> the image after importing it.

Here we see another shortcoming of Dia:  It cannot embed images.

> Iâd love to hear your input on these interests of mine.  I GREATLY
> appreciate your efforts on this project and if I implement Dia for
> this project I will do my best to support the project monetarily or
> otherwise.

Unless somebody can pay me some money to take time off work to do this,
I don't foresee me doing it any time soon, and I haven't heard anybody
else making serious noises about working on it.  Sorry.

-Lars