Welcome at the DiaCanvas home page on Sourceforge.

Project status

...time...

Time has passed by and DiaCanvas has had it's time in place. Current development on GTK+ (mainly the integration of the Cairo library and the deprication of the GnomeCanvas library) has made this library quite out-of-date. For most people this library has become an installation nightmare.

Gaphor, the foremost application thatuses DiaCanvas, has abandoned this library in favor of it's own, Python based,library. Libraries like goocanvas and crcanvas have taken the place of DiaCanvas.

About DiaCanvas2

DiaCanvas is in its second incarnation: DiaCanvas2. Aiming towards future computing needs on GNOME based desktop environments, DiaCanvas2 is providing you with a full featured diagramming canvas:

• Model/View/Controller based design: The DiaCanvas class only holds abstract data (using DiaShape objects), the data is rendered by one or more DiaCanvasView's.
• The widely used GnomeCanvas for visualization. This makes it easy to let DiaCanvas2 display anti-aliased diagrams with translucency (alpha) support.
• Export facilities for GnomePrint and SVG.
• Objects can be rotated/sheared/resized/etc. without the need to recalculate shapes. DiaCanvas relies heavily on the LibArt library (which is a standard GNOME library).
• Objects can connect to each other with handles. The connection is represented as a mathematical equation, which is solved using a linear constraint solver (see the reference documentation for more info). Handles do not need predefined connection points, but can connect to each other in a more generic way.
• Of course DiaCanvas2 has all the features a modern application needs, including undo/redo functionality.
• DiaCanvas2 is tested using Unit-tests. The unit test is a set of tests that ensure a consistent (application programming) interface.

Note that DiaCanvas is not related to the diagramming tool DIA, except for its look and feel.

Projects using DiaCanvas2

Gaphor

Gaphor is a UML modeling tool written in Python.

C# bindings

Martin Willemoes Hansen is doing a pretty good job creating C# language bindings for DiaCanvas2.

GraphTool

A graph editor tool written by Camille Huot and Aurelien Campeas (a.o.).

GNU Concept

A colaborative MindmapTool written by Fiz Vazquez.

If you also have a project that uses DiaCanvas, please send an e-mail.

Download

You can download DiaCanvas2 from the DiaCanvas Project Page.

To build DiaCanvas2 you need the following stuff installed:

• GTK+ 2.0 (GLib2, Pango, etc.).
• libgnomecanvas2.
• (optional) Python 2.2, PyGTK 1.99.16 or newer and gnome-python if you want to build the Python wrapper.
• (optional) libgnomeprint 2.2 for the GnomePrint export filter.

You can also check out the latest version from CVS. The module name is 'diacanvas2'. Note that you'll need version 1.6 of AutoMake.

Feedback

And if you run into trouble with DiaCanvas or if you just have a question or you would like a specific feature you can always send a mail to the DiaCanvas mailing list or contact one of the maintainers listed on the DiaCanvas Project Page directly.

There is also a nice IRC channel: #diacanvas at irc.gimp.net.