[albatross-users] Re: Including EPS files in source tarball

[Fabian Fagerholm]

On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 01:14, Dave Cole wrote:
> > Failing that, including the eps files sounds like a good idea.
> 
> Or we could try moving to a different drawing program for the diagrams. 
> I am not sure which one we should use.  We are already stuck on an old
> release of dia (0.88) because they have broken the font handling in EPS
> export.

The unfortunate truth is that in every respect, except for the lacks in
font handling and export features, Dia is quite good. That's probably
why you started using it in the first place -- its user interface is
very intuitive, and as long as you don't need to move the diagrams to
another program (including another version of Dia), you're going to be
fine. I've checked out some other programs including the following:

      * tcm - this is a program directed at very specific diagrams,
        including UML Class Diagrams (they call it Static Structure
        Diagrams). It uses a special file format. The user interface is
        horrid. EPS export requires X, so it's no better than Dia in
        that respect. Font handling is "better" because you can only
        select from a predefined set of fonts...
      * Umbrello - requires KDE, which makes it somewhat unsuitable for
        including in the build process. It can export to PNG, but as far
        as I can see, this works only from within the GUI...
      * xfig - a generic program for drawing figures. Redrawing the
        diagrams in xfig would probably be possible, but would require
        lots of work.
      * Sodipodi - a general-purpose vector drawing program. It saves in
        a subset of SVG, so the build process could use any SVG-to-EPS
        tool to render the images. Redrawing the diagrams would require
        lots of work.

Despite Dia's shortcomings, I think it may be the only way at the
moment. I've experimented with Dia's SVG output, but it's basically just
as bad as anything else (the fonts and page alignment mainly).

I think SVG is the way to go if you want to get rid of Dia. If you use
it, you can choose one tool now, and then move to another tool in the
future without having to redraw everything from scratch. You may be able
to export to SVG from Dia, and use the result as a starting point for
the SVG diagrams. With rsvg from the GNOME librsvg project
(http://librsvg.sourceforge.net/), any SVG file could be converted to
PNG, which is suitable for all the current Albatross doc formats.

Perhaps it would just be worth waiting for Dia to be fixed?

-- 
Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe at paniq.net>
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