# Quickstart

## What Can You Do?

Dia is a diagraming application made for many people. Dia is easy enough to learn without much hassle and flexible enough to make the power users feel right at home with their commercial tools. Below is an example of what five minutes of using Dia can provide.

### Demo

This is a diagram of a home network produced in under 5 minutes using Dia.

## Starting Dia

You can start Dia by going into the Applications section on the Main Menu and clicking on the Dia icon. Or, you can type `dia` in a console window or xterm.

## Quickstart Introduction

The Dia Quickstart is for the user who doesn't want to read a whole manual to make a basic diagram.

## Creating a Canvas

All diagrams are drawn in their own canvas. To create a new canvas, select File New Diagram A new canvas window will appear.

## Making a Diagram

A diagram is made up of objects. Objects are shapes that can be different colors, shapes, and sizes. They include everything from 2-bit images to full color pictures to text.

To add object to the canvas, click on an object in the toolbox and click on the canvas. The selected object will appear. The object can be manipulated mainly by clicking and dragging on the green corner buttons.

In the toolbox, you can double-click on any object to view its advanced properties. This allows you to customize the stock shape more to your liking.

Layers create multiple-images so they are one image. By doing this, a user can edit one layer without worrying about affecting any of the other layers.

Transparency allows objects to have transparent parts of an object, so anything behind the transparent section shows through.

Plug-ins allow the average user to easily add new object types to Dia, to help extend its functionability.

## Saving and Printing Your Diagram

Saving your diagram and printing your diagram is as easy as creating and modifying your document.

Dia supports saving and printing to printers. If you have gnome-print installed, the printing is very easy!

The print command can be found in the File menu when right-clicking on the canvas.

Dia supports exporting to numerous formats for excellent web publishing. Some of them include:

- Computer Graphics Metafile (.cgm)

- Encapsulated Postscript (.eps)

- Native Dia Format (.dia)

- Portable Network Graphics (.png)

- Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)

## Who Does Dia Appeal To?

Dia can appeal to many people in a variety of industries.

- An electrical engineer may use Dia to create a diagram to show how their circuit works.

- A computer programmer may use a flow chart to show the execution path of their program.

- A network administrator is able to create a diagram to show how their company network is layed out.