Rating and comments for Dia

We have a phraise 'Nothing could be more dia' and it speaks very ill of the dia project; a gui nightmare of rotten and old code which works but is never going to be improved without a lot of work.

But there is not much of a community behind Dia and even the original programmer is doing other things and has been for some time.

For many basic needs, Open Office Draw will be better. Dia is more robust in terms of features, but it has a clunky interface. Also, in Windows, the printing pagination is messed up for me. So, my ability to use it is limited.

Dia did what I needed, as long as what I needed wasn't to exchange files with Visio users or use Visio templates. If there's a newer version of this (or any other package that interoperates with Visio the way OpenOffice interoperates with Word and Excell, I haven't found it.

Too limited for the real world.

I wanted to implemented flowcharts with specific shapes. I had to spend a little time to learn enough on SVG format, but this was eased by reading the numerous XML shapes examples. But you can draw you shape within Dia and export it in SVG format, and this can ease new shapes design.

The 'gnome style GUI' (one master window and separates document windows) can be disturbing for windows users not used to The Gimp for example.

I am now using Dia every day with satisfaction. I easyly export my Dia file in Windows Metafile format, and import this file in Word. This works fine.

For printing problems, you can change page setup to print in 1x1 page.

My first impression is 4/5.

Need simple UML for some documentation. Looks like it should perform that nicely

this is not good. no ability to change many objects at a time and lines connect to where i dont want them.

Deeply flawed in many respects. Exporting and manipulating data is awful.

Lousy compared to openoffice Draw. Very poor interface.

The ability to define new shapes makes this tool very valuable. And it exports into any known format. The own format is an xml format. The user interface is just fine. Some people cannot handle it. They should use the provided tutorial...

reminds me of OSF motif software that were developped.. well a decade ago, which is probably what dia is to the core.
I do not understand how this product can be listed as an alternative to microsoft visio, even to what vision wasz before it was bought by microsoft for that matter, which have us back a decade ago :-)

Take this application off osalt.com. It is not an alternative to anything.

thank uuuuuuuuu

it has some bugs, some GUI usefull feature missing but rember it's free. It's an alternative to Visio if you want something free. If you want something complete and can put the money on it take visio for now.

Didn't meet my expectations. I needed a tool for ER modelling, but found no way to resize entity boxes, create more connection points or attach text to the end of lines.

Small, free, does it's job!

For all of you morons who say this sucks; how much did you pay for it?

Seriously.. it is free software.. if you don't like it, then re-write the code to your liking or STFU...

So bad I think it gave me cancer!
As an alternative to visio (which was never that hot to begin with) this is bowel-looseningly awful. Minimal symbol set, incredibly akward interface, poor export functionality.. Best avoided.

double thumbs down. I'd thought that default shapes of all sorts should be there. Ditto with auto alignment and stuff like that. After the first five minutes, i'm switching back to Inkscape. I can't see any difference.

Very cool