Technical Drawings with Dia

Dia is an excellent multi-platform diagram drawing tool originally written by Alexander Larsson. Unlike Visio, it works well on Windows and Linux, and best part -- it is free.

I have been using it for a good part of the last 10 years and always enjoy its functionality.

The most unintuitive aspect of embedding Dia drawings into your Microsoft Word document or PowerPoint presentation is how to export the drawing to appropriate picture format.

Before you start working on your drawing with Dia, change drawing setting to these:

• File|Page Setup to:
  
  1. Paper Size: Letter
  2. Scaling: 45
• Under View menu item:
  
  1. Select AntiAliased
  2. Unselect Snap To Objects

Now, proceed with your drawing diagram. You can disregard the fact that it might span over multiple pages. When you are finished, go back to File|Page Setup and change Scaling of it to Fit to: 1 by 1. This will rescale your drawing to fit in a page. The reason for that is the physical constraint of Microsoft Word document which is page-oriented.

Now you are ready to export your drawing from Dia internal XML format to one of the compressed graphics formats such as JPEG, GIF, or PNG.
Open 'Export Diagram' dialog via File|Export. We are going to use PNG as graphics file format as it works well in the documents and on the web across all imaginable platforms.

The trick is to select the right PNG format out of all available which are:

• Cairo PNG (*.png)
• Cairo PNG (with alpha) (*.png)
• Pixbuf[png] (*.png)
• PNG (anti-aliased) (*.png)

The right format would be the last available, PNG (anti-aliased).

When selected, press 'Save' button and then a little dialog 'diaw.exe' pops up to let you specify PNG Export Options. This is very important as you can set Image width of your final picture.

For Microsoft Word document I set Image widht to 800 and let the dialog adjust the height.

For PowerPoint presentation, set it to 1200 and also remember to have your document orientation set to Landscape in the File|Page Setup we did at the beginning.

When you import the picture in your Word document, you can resize it to better fit the flow of your text.

Formatting Source Code with astyle

astyle is a source code indenter, formatter, and beautifier for the C, C++, C# and Java programming languages. It is cross-platform and gets the job done pretty well.

I use a combination of these switches to get code formatted to my liking:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Name: indent++
#
astyle \
    --style=1tbs \
    --indent=tab=4 \
    --indent-switches \
    --indent-preprocessor \
    --convert-tabs \
    --break-blocks \
    --break-closing-brackets \
    --unpad-paren \
    --pad-header \
    --pad-oper \
    --pad-paren-out \
    --add-brackets \
    --align-pointer=type \
    --align-reference=type < $file > $file.indented

mv $file $file.orig
mv $file.indented $file

How to change text font size in Microsoft MSDN 2008 Document Explorer

MSDN Library that comes with Visual Studio 2008 shows its content in Microsoft Document Explorer. The Explorer is a index/search engine with embedded Internet Explorer that shows the text.

One annoying thing that I found is the size of the text fonts. They appear really tiny on my Dell 2009W Wide Screen monitor that sports 1680x1050 resolution.

The Font Resize button on Document Explorer's own toolbar has no effect on the text font size. It took me some digging to learn how to control the font size:

1. Start MSDN Library. Wait for Microsoft Document Explorer to start up.
2. Click on Tools->Options. The Options dialog comes up. Note that its Environment/'Fonts and Colors' setting has no effect on the size of the text fonts.
   
3. Instead, select Help/'Web Browser', and click on 'Internet Explorer Options..." button.
   
   
4. Choose 'General' tab and click on 'Accessibility' button in 'Appearance' section. 
5. In 'Accessibility' dialog that pops up under 'Formatting' section enable:
   
   • Ignore font styles specified on webpage
   • Ignore font sizes specified on webpage 
   
6. Confirm to all the changes

This should effectively change the size of the text fonts in the Document Explorer.