Software:Dia

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Short description: Diagramming software
Dia
Dia.svg
Dia 0.97 - Flowchart example.png
Dia 0.97 in Norwegian on Windows Vista
Original author(s)Alexander Larsson
Developer(s)Dia developers
Initial release31 August 1998; 25 years ago (31 August 1998)[1]
Repositorygitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/dia/ (upstream), github.com/GNOME/dia (mirror)
Written inC
Operating systemWindows, OS X, Linux, Unix
TypeDiagramming software
LicenseGPL-2.0-or-later

Dia (/ˈdə/)[2] is free and open source general-purpose diagramming software, developed originally by Alexander Larsson.[1] It uses a controlled single document interface (SDI) similar to GIMP and Inkscape.

Features

Dia has a modular design with several shape packages available for different needs: flowchart, network diagrams, circuit diagrams, and more. It does not restrict symbols and connectors from various categories from being placed together.

Dia has special objects to help draw entity-relationship models, Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and simple electrical circuits. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to draw the shape.

Dia loads and saves diagrams in a custom XML format which is, by default, gzipped to save space. It can print large diagrams spanning multiple pages[3] and can also be scripted using the Python programming language.

Exports

Dia can export diagrams to various formats, including:

  • EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)
  • SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
  • DXF (Autocad's Drawing Interchange format)
  • CGM (Computer Graphics Metafile, defined by ISO standard 8632)
  • WMF (Windows Meta File)
  • PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
  • JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
  • VDX (Microsoft's XML for Visio Drawing)

Development

Dia was originally created by Alexander Larsson[2] but he moved on to work on GNOME and other projects. James Henstridge took over as lead developer, but he also moved on to other projects. He was followed by Cyrille Chepelov, then Lars Ræder Clausen.

Dia is currently maintained by Hans Breuer, Steffen Macke and Sameer Sahasrabuddhe.

It is written in C, and has an extension system which also supports writing extensions in Python.

See also

References

External links