Re: bugs in Dia for Windows

["Lars Clausen" <lars raeder dk>]

Paul Balyoz sagde:
> I have been looking for a good replacement for Visio for Windows, and
> stumbled upon Dia.  Dia looked very promising, but has way too many bugs
> at
> this time.  I don't have time to type them all into Bugzilla, but I didn't
> want to move on without at least saying something to the developers.  Here
> are a few notes I made while using Dia during the past 2 days.  This is
> for
> the latest stable release, splash screen says version 0.95-1.

Yep, that is the latest.

> * font size defaults to humongous drawing size with teeny paper on the
> screen, for the default of zoom=100%.  The percent is totally wrong, 285%
> is
> closer to 1:1 what you see on the screen, versus actual paper size.

The default zoom not being 1:1 is reported.  If we get that fixed, we may
well change the default sizes of a number of objects to be appropriate for
that (that part I believe is also reported)

> * there aren't enough features when you ctrl-click or shift-click, or
> combinations of those.  Let me select multiple boxes to make a
> properties-change to, by shift-click/ctrl-click.

They can be control-clicked to select multiple boxes, but the properties
change for multiple objects is difficult (and reported).  We need to avoid
what changing properties for groups currently does, namely setting *all*
properties to be the same, not just the changed ones.

> * CTRL-Y should do "again" operation.  In other words, repeat the last
> operation on the currently selected items.
>    i.e. when resizing font of a text area, I want to resize ALL of them,
> one
> at a time, by selecting the next one and hitting ^Y.

Haven't heard of that one before.  Gimp and Gnumeric both use Ctrl-Y for
Redo.

> * Font size makes no sense: what is "0.80"?  It's a giant font.  0.20 is a
> teeny tiny font, about 1/10th the size of 0.80.

It's in centimeters.  I'll have to look into the scaling you mention, it's
not reported yet.

> * properties of an item need more features, like edit-box for the text
> inside it (where you can range select or shift-drag the text).

We are trying to move towards where all text can be edited in-diagram, and
that editing is with a real GtkEntry that allows fancy editing.  The
current text edit hack is lacking and cumbersome.

> * Please enable printing of "only page 1", or "pages 2-3", that sort of
> feature.  It's disabled on Windows.

There's no underlying support for it, and it could be confusing because
the pages aren't really numbered at the moment, they're just parts of an
infinite virtual sheet.  This is AFAIR not reported in Bugzilla yet.

> * need icon binding for .dia files in windows (windows just uses the
> generic
> unknown file type icon today).

That's a Windows installer issue.  Steffen?

> * holding ctrl, or shift, or alt and dragging the end of a line does not
> snap it to its own vert/horiz alignment, or to any grid lines, that I
> could
> see.

Ctrl keeps the mouse movements to vertical or horizontal.

> * Dia opens in weird size window, regardless of size of diagram or size of
> screen.  If you resize it and quit, it doesn't save the window size, so
> you
> get the weird size everytime you open the file.

There's a planned fix for that and similar issues that involves storing
"view" information in the .dia file.

> * You can't select text in an editable text area (standalone text, or text
> in a box); therefore you cannot replace a word or sentence, you have to
>    mouse around and backspace to erase a part and retype it.  This means
> you
> also can't copy text to another place.

See above about replacing text editing.  You can copy text with the menu
point "Copy Text".

> * No way to change font size/style for a portion of text - like, I cannot
> make a box with a big-point bold word first, then smaller italic words
> below
> it.

Oft requested, but it's an openended implementation.  I don't want Dia to
turn into a text editor (even if I frequently use it for DTP:).

> * there's a bug where part of the text in a box is obviously one font size
> and part is another, but there's no way to fix it.  I think it's screen
> bug
> only, printing the diagram resulted in all same size font as expected.

That's probably due to the scaling issues we have had -- Pango gives us no
way to force the width of a text to a certain size, so we have a rather
ugly hack around that until it Pango improves.  Since each line is
pangoified seperately, they can end up with different sizes:(  This is
reported many times.

> * selection-rectangle sometimes seems to select objects that it merely
> touches (not completely engulfing); however, if "not enough" of the object
> was touched, it is not selected.
>    I can't predict how much of an object to touch to make it select the
> object every time.

There is an preferences setting for whether dragging right-to-left selects
everything you touch, or if you always have to completely surround the
objects.

> * Properties dialog: pressing ENTER does not dismiss the box by clicking
> the
> OK button, even though OK is colored like it is the default button.

That has been mentioned recently, and is fixed in CVS.

> * No way to tell the flowchart square box that its inner text should be
> vertical justified "top". It's always center-justified, vertically.

That would be a simple fix, since other objects already have that part
implemented.  I think it is reported.

> * If you have dual windows such that your secondary screen is to the side
> of
> your primary one but up "higher" 20 to 40 pixels, then Dia opens its main
> window up too high so you can't see the top part of it, and you can't drag
> it, get to any menus, or dismiss it!  90% of Dia's functionality is now
> broken, from my point of view.

Can't say much there, as I have no dual-screen, esp. under Windows.  I
could be religious and claim that Windows has a sucky window manager that
doesn't allow you to move windows by clicking anywhere in them, but I
won't :)  I think this has been reported, too.

> * Default margins of 2+ inches on each side is way way too large; should
> default to about .5 inches (1.2 cm) or so, for drawing applications.

It's one inch, actually, all measurements are in cm.

> I hope some/all of this was useful to the developers.  I think Dia has a
> good future, after these kinds of issues are resolved.  I will visit Dia
> again in another year or so.

Thank you for all your comments.  I'm sorry to say that the problems are
not due to us not being aware of the issues, but lack of manpower.

-Lars