This directory contains the new canvas we are designing for Dia.
Hopefully it will be useful to others as well.

It differs from the GNOME canvas in that it has a different
approach.

First the primitives used are the classicals like point,
line, rectangle... and groups, but it also has three other
non classical primitives that are connection point,
attract point and attracted point.

They are used to connect groups and set the snap system.

More over, dia-newcanvas has a model/view split.
One DiaCanvas can have multiple DiaCanvasViews.  The API for using
DiaCanvas is quite similar to that of GnomeCanvas, as can be seen in
the simple test-diacanvas.c example program.

Also, all rendering tasks are performed through an abstract
DiaRenderer interface.  This allows views to implement new rendering
methods without modification of the canvas items (we plan on providing
gdk and libart canvas views at a minimum).  The abstract renderer
interface also provides support for transparent printing support.

Gdk-pixbuf is used for image loading and rendering, and Pango is used
for text rendering (or at least will be, once I finish that bit of
code).

To compile DiaCanvas, you will need a fairly recent snapshot of
gtk+-2.0, along with its dependencies.

Running autogen.sh --help gives you the configure option and
creates the configure script. After that, you can do
configure, make
At this stage, you can test the canvas with test-diacanvas.

Enjoy !!!
