Dia is basically inspired from Microsoft Visio, it can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It has special objects which let you draw many types of diagrams like ERD (Entity Relationship Diagrams), UML diagrams, flowcharts, and network diagrams easily. Whatever type of diagram you need to draw, whether it is some map or some plan of any room of your house, it has the full ability to cater to your needs and helps you produce a precise and professional-looking diagrams within minutes.
Lets explore how we can install and use it in Ubuntu, open the terminal and run the following command to install it.
sudo apt-get install dia
Once installation is complete, you can launch it from Applications > Graphics > Dia Diagram Editor.
Once you will launch it, you will notice that its Tools window is also launched with it. It contains set of tools which lets you draw different types of objects within a diagram. You can use Tools window to draw different objects like a Box, Ellipse, Polygon, Beziergergon, Line, Arc, Polyline, etc. Simply click the particular type of object and click in the Dia’s window to draw that. You can also easily manage the foreground and background color of any diagram from Tools window in an easy manner.
It also lets users export their diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and you may also print these diagrams. Enjoy!
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12 Comments
Interestingly enough, it does actually compete. One of my uni projects switched to Dia after having a hard time manipulating Visio.
Great to hear that.
OpenOffice Draw has a new rival.
Are there any stencils for Dia??
The problem, ist that in business there are people who use viso.
To be interoperable one mast be able to save into vsd and read from vsd.
openoffice can replace excel, word, powerpoint,
But there is no visio replacement that can read and export the fileformat of visio !!!
Has to be fixed asap!
I can't open .vsd files. There does not appear to be this file extension in the File open list. Any ideas?
I can't open .vsd files. There does not appear to be this file extension in the File open list. Any ideas?
I can't open .vsd files. There does not appear to be this file extension in the File open list. Any ideas?
It's not a Visio.
Thanks for this simple starter. On the Visio file format: I believe it's proprietary (ie secret) and not going to be opened up by Microsoft. I've never understood this : surely their position is strengthened by interoperability? I doubt very much they care much about the existence of Dia, other commercial draughtsman tools will be their concern.
There is an Apache Java project trying to implement Visio file read/write: http://poi.apache.org/hdgf/index.html
Cheers, al.
diadiagram
You should could use packet Tracer for linux to diagram networks orCartoreso to automatic generated a network maps