GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 96822
Better Grid (grouped multicoloured, zoom, overlay...)
Last modified: 2005-08-15 01:28:53 UTC
There are various ways in which i think the Grid in Dia could be improved, some of which i have mentioned previously on the mailing list. The simplest way is to make the grid more like Graph paper. Some graph paper is monochrome and just user a slightly heavier thicker lines to indicate a certain grouping of blocks. I would go for groups of 5 and 10. Gobe Productive uses a 4x4 grouping (i think visio might vary depending on zoomlevel). The grid should use slightly different line thickness (and colour) so that users can at a glance identify blocks of ten smaller blocks. The grid should not be drawn exactly the same at every zoom level. The closer you zoom in the more grid gets drawn at zoomlevel 1:1 you draw a line every 1cm but at zoom leverl 1:16 you draw a line every mililmeter ... Currently if you zoom very far out there is so much grid being shown that it all blends together into a great blue blob and then dissappears entirely. (I will attach a screenshot). My third and final suggestion is probably the most radical, as it requires you to think in terms of computers more than in terms of pen and paper diagrams. And will require a fair bit of though and discussion before i will be sure if it is really such a good idea. The Grid should be an Overlay, it should be the layer at the very top, not the layer at the very bottom. In a very busy diagram with many layers and objects in it the Grid is obscured and it is very difficult to make much use of it. If you want to put down a background image the grid will be almost completely hidden. If the grid is done as the top layer my concern would be that it might cover up too much of the drawing but hopefully if my above suggestion was implemented or pehaps the grid had some sort of transparencey then an overlay grid might work very well. I should probably seperate out these three requests into seperate bugs, and i think i have listed them the order which they can be most easily implemented, so if and when the first enhancement gets made i will file the other two as seperate bugs and move any requests across.
Created attachment 11833 [details] grid looks bad when you zoom far out
Three screenshots showing the Grid in Visio at differnt zoom levels http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/~horkana/dia/visio/screenshots/MicrosoftVisio2000-0004_grid37zoom.png http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/~horkana/dia/visio/screenshots/MicrosoftVisio2000-0005_grid50zoom.png http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/~horkana/dia/visio/screenshots/MicrosoftVisio2000-0006_grid75zoom.png
Created attachment 15543 [details] [review] Patch to do dynamic grid.
A quick hack to experiment with dynamic grid. This simply ignores the grid settings and makes an appropriate power-of-ten grid. Wouldn't be hard to have every tenth line be thicker or darker. Try it and see how you feel about it.
Downloaded your patch, need to take it home to try it, will get back to you. As my Isometric shapes were nearly finished and while messing about with gfig (part of the Gimp) i thought an Isometric Grid woudl be pretty cool. http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/~horkana/dia//screenshots/mockups/DiaIsometricGrid_mockup.png
Some chemists would most certainly love that.
Adding the PATCH keyword.
Patch has been applied, as well as 'thickness' idea (#1). Overlay is proposed in some other bug whose number eludes me.