On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Trent Buck wrote:
Quoth Bryce Harrington on or about 2004-06-22:
For cartoon work, you may eventually want to do text bubbles.
Maybe this could be expanded into a module kinda like we have already for markers (arrow head & tails).
Possibly, although honestly I found making them by hand to be a snap, and allows for a wide range of flexibility...
The thing that feels missing to make this perfect is to be able to attach the text to the bubble, and flow the text in a way that fits within the bubble's boundaries.
...One thing I'd love to be able to use Inkscape for is Dia/Visio style diagrams. ATM it's a tough decision between a Inkscape's superb interface and a Dia's slightly better flowchat support.
You and me both... For bread and butter functional diagrams that you actually use as part of your software development process, dia is pretty good and quick, but it really falls down hard when you want to make pretty diagrams for a paper or a presentation. Inkscape does well for the latter, but it takes a bit of time to get all the bits right. The one major barrier to use - lack of arrowheads - has been eliminated, but there's still a number of features needed before it can honestly be considered usable for diagramming. However, given the rate of accumulation of new features, plus the strong interest in diagram support among the developers and users, I think it's inevitable that we'll get there; it'll be pretty sweet when we do!
I would probably say for 'plain old diagramming' purposes, the next key feature we need would probably either be symbol libraries or wrapped-text-in-a-box. We need text-in-box capability for a lot of other stuff too. Line autorouting and line breaks (for where two lines overlap) will also be needed. I think if we had those four features, then Inkscape would probably have the edge over dia for most diagramming needs.
Bryce