Hi Martin,
good to hear, I had suggested the same idea to Dia devs some years ago bud did not get through with it.
There are some nice generic features, that could be envisioned as future extensions, when the design allows for arbitrary placement of connections on the objects outline, like:
- defining layout/placement policies by object template to allow for fancy automatic placement behavior
- automatically sliding anchors (dots) along the object outline, while moving objects on the canvas
- automatically laying out connections equidistantly along a segment of the outline
- restricting placements to a subset of the outline
- storing hints for how lines should connect inside the generic outline anchor (eg. if to attache rectangular or at an angle normal to the shape or at a predefined angle, what arrow shape to default to, etc.).
Hans
You've asked for pretty much where the direction of the discussion has gone. I've just taken a hatched to the code to remove the absolute user defined points as well as the code to add them, all the editor mode work and basically I've reverted back to just having a central handle with my additions of having group anchors it works well enough[1] for a system of manually creating your anchors with the xml editor could be.
Martin,