I'm just getting started with Dia. When I open a new diagram, there are 2 layers of grids. One has a very light blue color with most lines thin/dotted and some lines thick/solid. There is another grid layer that is dark blue that has a strange spacing interval relation to the lighter grid. Horizontally it has an interval about 16.51 grid squares. Vertically it is about every 23.0888 grid square. I don't recognize these numbers for any graphical or layout purposes. Any idea what this grid is for?

I tried to remove the grid. Doing so only removes the light color grid that has a sensible interval. Instead, I want to remove the mysterious dark colored grid. Any idea how to remove the silly grid? It's hard to see what I'm doing with this grid in the way.

Well, there's a golden instruction for almost everything man made; RTFM (Read The Fine Manual)

Anyway, those dark line are neither mysterious, nor without-purpose. They are in fact quite essential.

Think of it as this. One block delimited by the dark lines represent a page in your diagram. In most of the distros, they are fixed by default. Which means if you want your diagram to fit into one page, you'll need to do your work within one of those
dark rectangles. In most cases, that is not convenient.

So, people who use Dia often set the scaling setting to "Fit to" (usually 1 by 1). Then you can do your diagramming freely and Dia will automatically fit your digram into one page. This might not sound clean in writing. Just try it for yourself and you'll see. Pace to look: File --> Page Setup --> Section "Scaling" --> Set "Fit to". It's mentioned in the FAQ.

I just tried that. I don't really understand what that did. I saw it change the dark blue lines to a smaller interval (now worse). I really don't know what is fit to what by this.

Is Dia trying to force me to make diagrams that span multiple pages, by default, and just showing me where the boundaries are? If so that means I have 2 new questions: 1: how do I make it just work only in one page (most of the time that's all I will need)? 2: How can I change the color or even texture of these lines (properties somewhere)?

When I did Visio a few years ago, it just showed me one page, with a margin, much like a document. I could exceed that margin if I wished, but it was there to guide me. And it wasn't this annoying dark line that overshadows the light lines. There was some configuration to make the page be other sizes. I don't know if there was a multi-page setup or not (never needed it). I'm looking at the FAQ again (now that I know the meaning of the dark lines) but I don't see anything about forcing a single page.

Please read the reply properly. All the questions you asked were answered even before you asked (because I anticipated them).

To summarize, here's the answers to your questions:
Q1. See what I said about "Fit to" scaling option.
Q2. I'm not sure if you can change the color or texture of gridlines using settings.

Your problem is not about Dia, it's mostly because you are thinking in something else.

Dia is also showing you the margin of the page and there's guidance. It even allow the diagram to fit automatically to one page regardless of the scale your draw (hint: scaling, fit to), which is a feature I'm not sure if even available for Visio.

Now that I know the dark lines are page boundaries, I looked again at other documentation. There's no discussion of pages, page boundaries, or page setup, either. I'd like to set it up for ONE page AND have margins at one inch (or 25mm in metric to line it to the metric grid) with the margins marked.

I don't understand what "fit to" means in here. Sure, I realize I'm thinking in something else. I can't change that until I know what I'm changing it to. Maybe a document that explains the page methods in Dia? This seems to be skipped in things like the manual and tutorial (I guess they assumed it would be understood).

Just stop thinking Visio and you'll be fine. I'm sure which part of my explanation you are not following. Or you have a quite short attention span.

I'm surprised that you can't find page setup settings in File --> Page Setup (i.e. for margins, paper size and scaling)

Let me dilute this down further. In Page Setup you can set your paper size.
1. Paper size - The dark blue rectangle represents a single page of this size.

Scaling section has two options:
1. Scale - The scale your diagram is going to show up on the paper. You'll notice the default 100 means your diagram will look exactly the same on the paper. 50 means it'll be scaled down by half. To understand what I mean, simply draw a diagram fitting inside a single page and then set scale to 50 and see.

The 2nd and more important for you is,
2. Fit to - This means how many papers your diagram will fit to. 1 by 1 means it'll fit exactly into 1 page (according to your paper size). Like that 3 by 2 means it'll fit into a grid of papers spanning horizontally 3 papers and vertically 2 papers.

That's why the dark blue rectangle kept shrinking to fit the piece of digram you had, when you selected fit to (1 by 1). Just experiment and see.


Hope that clears things up for you. If that's not clear enough, then probably you are not reading through or trying the settings. I already know how to do this. So it's you who's got to do a little fiddling around and see what exactly I meant.

I'm not going to reply again, until you stop and read carefully what's already in this thread.

I'm trying to stop thinking Visio, but I don't know what the alternate is. I know what I want to achieve, and I'm not getting a platform to do that. Getting a platform that tries to make me draw a diagram spanning 576 pages makes no sense to me.

I did find File -> Page Setup, and I did try the "fit to" setting of "1 by 1". It didn't improve things. It made things worse.

The paper size is set to Letter (21.6cm x 27.9cm). That's how it started, presumably because of the US locality settings in the system. That's the page size I want.

I noticed the default scale is 100. I didn't know what that meant before you told me. The tutorial mentioned the scale setting as 100 but didn't explain its meaning. I saw no reason to change it, but I played around with changing it to see if that would reveal a meaning. It did not from just a couple changes. I'll try what you suggest with scale 50 when I figure out how to "draw a diagram fitting inside a single page" (that seems to be the issue here).

That's a nice feature for it to let me draw a diagram that would fit across many pages of paper. I can imagine sometime I might need that. I can imagine many people might need that regularly. But maybe it's not actually working on my copy of Dia (version 0.97 in Ubuntu 9.10, 64 bit). I say that because these dark lines you have explained represent pages changed when I did the "fit to 1 by 1" setting such that there are now more of them, in a tighter configuration.

Maybe it's my system or my monitor, but these dark lines are very intrusive. I cannot see the grid unless I squint very close to the monitor. I cannot see where I am drawing anything until I can make these dark lines go away. I know the dimensions I want to draw things in either metric or English units. All I need is the light blue grid BY ITSELF while drawing. I want the dark lines to just GO AWAY.

If the purpose of this is to take what I have drawn and resize it to fit a page, then that is NOT what I want to do. If I draw a 2cm x 2cm square, I want it to STAY as 2cm x 2cm unless and until I explicitly rescale it for some reason (and I rarely expect to do that). That is the purpose I'm using a program like Dia or Visio instead of some paint program that doesn't concern itself much about real dimensions.

Still, I could get around this if I could get the feature to STAY AWAY until such time as I'm done drawing. The reason for that is because it is interfering with the visualization of drawing. If I were making a drawing that I wanted to expand to fit a 3x3 arrangement of 9 pages when printed, so I looks larger, than sure, that is a fine feature. But it should be a post-drawing rendering feature, NOT a get-in-your-face-while-drawing feature. I see no reason for a "how we will ultimately modify the printing of this" to have to be present at the drawing stage.

I hope maybe this time you can understand what I'm trying to accomplish. I have a exact diagram in my mind I want to draw. If Dia isn't designed to let me accomplish this, or the current version is too buggy to do this, then tell me so and I'll go order another computer with a copy of Windows 7 and Visio and "get it done".

I'm not saying Dia is going to win any usability award any time soon. I'm just saying you are not even giving a fair try.

You say, when you choose fit to (1 by 1) the grid gets tighter. Yes, it completely does that. But have you tried placing a few more components of the diagram in the drawing area?

I think not. Because, if you tried drawing some more, then you would have noticed that when you draw more Dia will automatically span the grid to include all of your drawing into one box. That's what fit to means. So you'll have your diagram in one paper/page.

This might not be familiar. I know I felt so the first few times. But the more I use it, the more it makes sense. I have found myself wishing for this feature whenever I'm using other diagramming tool and find that my drawing is either too small or too big for the page.

I can see what you mean, and can sympathise with that. I'm just saying, if you can give honest 10 mins to learn Dia (opposed to try use Visio or any other tool within Dia), you'll find that it's not that bad. Actually it's quite convenient.

Hope things will work for you. Good luck.

I can't place what I intend to draw with a grid like that. I need to solve the problem of this grid in the way before I do the drawing.

Yes, the grids move around (even more annoying). I just want to see the ruler grid (e.g. the grid with exact dimensions that remain constant like centimeters or inches) and place objects that way. If the page is set for a specific size, the page grid should be there. And it even starts out that way. Zooming seems to be a better job, but seems "wrong" to be zoomed in to 1200% to see 1 cm as 1 cm. I'm beginning to think that this is the solution for me ... to just zoom in and not bother with the fit mechanism.

If I was drawing, and decided I need to extend the drawing beyond what a page is, I should have a tool to scale the draw (or just the highlighted parts of it, as desired). The tool should providing common scaling factors or allow me to enter my own. It can suggest scaling factors that will bring the drawing within a single page, and even have a button to just do the rescale to precisely what fits the page.

But to start out, I should be able to say how many pages I expect to need, or choose a pageless canvas scheme (and decide later). Paging it is really part of a rendering process, anyway. Pages make sense for certain output formats or devices, but not for all. I should be able to specify the geometry of an image output for PNG for example (like 768x1024). I should be able to similarly specify the paging geometry (print this as 8 pages wide and 5 pages high ... or output that way in Postscript). It is a good feature to support clean multi-paging. But the paging should not be an integral part of the content (more like an attached suggestion that gets used as the default) and certainly not a part of the UI beyond what the user selects to see (e.g. I need to be able to turn pages off and just draw by cm).

I have not used Visio for many years and I'm trying to avoid having to use it now just so I don't have to get another computer that only gets used for Visio (I don't know of anything else I would need to run on Windows). I'm trying to use Dia. I don't think that Visio experience is impairing me, because I don't see how I could easily draw no matter what.

At this point I'm going to explore the zooming approach. At least that gets me well between those dark lines. I need dynamic grid and snap-to-grid to make it easy to place things. Too bad it doesn't figure out to use an English (inches) grid when choosing an English page size (e.g. 8.5x11 Letter). I may just need to set my margins to a whole cm number and work that way.

Hi,

I had the same problem and solved it by setting the separator grid color to white (in File->Diagram properties).

HTH