Creating a custom shape for DIA: my notebook.

In the this post, I'll describe how to create a custom shape for DIA, a diagram creation program.

• The logo of the NCBI (149x183) was downloaded from commons.wikimedia.org.
  
• Inkscape was used to transform this picture to a vectorial drawing (SVG).
• In ${HOME}/.dia/sheet, I wrote the following sheet describing the package Bio and containing one object named "Bio - NCBI"
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
  <sheet xmlns="http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/dia-sheet-ns">
  <name>Bio</name>
  <description>Bio</description>
  <contents>
  <object name="Bio - NCBI">
  <description>Shape</description>
  </object>
  </contents>
  </sheet>
  
  
• I moved the icon ncbi.png to ${HOME}/.dia/shapes/ncbi.png,
• The object "Bio - NCBI" was defined in ${HOME}/.dia/shapes/ncbi.shape. This object contains the SVG drawing and defines 8 points for connecting the objects.
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
  <shape xmlns="http://www.daa.com.au/~james/dia-shape-ns" xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <name>Bio - NCBI</name>
  <description>NCBI</description>
  <icon>ncbi.png</icon>
  <connections>
  <point x="0" y="0"/>
  <point x="149" y="0"/>
  <point x="149" y="183"/>
  <point x="0" y="183"/>
  <point x="0" y="91"/>
  <point x="149" y="91"/>
  <point x="74" y="0"/>
  <point x="74" y="183"/>
  </connections>
  <aspectratio type="fixed"/>
  <textbox x1="0" y1="0" x2="149" y2="183"/>
  <svg:svg version="1.0" width="149" height="183" style="stroke-width:0.1;">
  <svg:rect x="0" y="0" width="149" height="183" fill="#326598" stroke="black"/>
  <svg:path fill-rule="nonzero"
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  fill="white" stroke="none" />
  
  
  </svg:svg>
  </shape>
  
• run dia ...

Et voila!

That's it,

Pierre