Bug 53699

The use of a SVG canvas would be very nice indeed.  Not because the coolness factor but for the sake of scaling huge diagrams -- and what diagram isn't huge nowadays?  While I know of no cross application canvas that's usable right now, I'd still like to see this and with the nice maturity of KSVG all that's left is that darned canvas of sorts.

In addition to some cool rendering effects you can apply as well.
<begin dreaming>
Slight shadows under the class diagram boxes would be nice
</end dreaming>

KCanvas in kdenonbeta is that mythical SVG canvas :) It's not anywhere close to be being ready but that means you can influence it's development to make sure it works nicely in umbrello.

Umbrello has been able to export to SVG for some time.

Hopefully QCanvas in Qt 4 will support antialias.

It's not really about antialiasing so that lines appear smooth, it's more about how the diagram scales and fits on a finite width piece of printer paper. Sure, I guess you could first export to SVG and then open the SVG somewhere else and scale it and make it nice, but why not just use SVG for the canvas itself in the first place?

Roger <rboxman@gmail.com> [041204 09:22]:
> ------- Additional Comments From rboxman gmail com  2004-12-04 06:59 -------
> It's not really about antialiasing so that lines appear smooth, it's more
> about how the diagram scales and fits on a finite width piece of printer
> paper. Sure, I guess you could first export to SVG and then open the SVG
> somewhere else and scale it and make it nice, but why not just use SVG for
> the canvas itself in the first place?

Because this is an implementation concern. Could you please write what you
expect from Umbrello, what does not work at the moment? Then we can decide,
if using SVG is a possible solution. At the moment it looks like we have a
solution (SVG) and we are looking for a problem.


Sebastian

Ah that's interesting, didn't know it could export to SVG.  If this is the case then there is no 'absolute' need to do this in Umbrello -- except for usability, greater graphics potential, and the coolness factor.

When I had to conjure up UML diagrams for several school projects they always started out neat and easy to view on a page. As I explored the problem space and refined my solution, however, it became a royal pain to keep things all within the viewport even on my 1600x1200 monitor.  Even with SVG export, I'd have to make a diagram, then export it, and then maybe manipulate it again with the corresponding SVG application -- and do it all over again if I had last minute changes -- this happend after my group had printed out a 4000x4000 large (combined) diagram :(.  That just doesn't seem right.  Having SVG support right on the canvas would be great.  I think uml arrows pointing to boxes would look better with SVG then with line drawing too.

RE: 'implementation concern'
As for the implementation interface of KCanvas vs. the use of QCanvas(guessing), perhaps it might offer better support for the things you might do to diagrams like add slight shadows under your class boxes, or maybe provide other sorts of things to add to the Umbrello experience... I don't know.  This is completely in your hands now though.  You could also still influence the design of KCanvas since it's still in its childhood if you so choose.

The SVG support is available since 5 years and printing on bigger sizes has already been requested (I don't remember the bug number).

We can close this bug because it solves the export problem.