• View
• Edit
• Upload
• History
• Print

UseDiaFilesDirectlyInLyXAsPdf

<How to use Dia files directly in Lyx as PDF>

1.  Three easy steps

1. Install dia
2. Add dia's bin folder to the PATH environment variable
3. Reconfigure (Under Tools) Lyx and restart it

1.1  Adding a converter for Dia files to PDF

go to tools -> Preference -> file handling -> converters and change:

from format DIA, to format PDF (pdflatex), converter: dia --export=$$o $$i. Then Add.
Then do a Tools -> reconfigure, restart. That worked for me.

1.2  Adding a path variable for Dia (on Windows)

For me the above did not work, although the general goal was correct. I had to add dia to the path so that the command for the conversion to work. Also, specifying the conversion command manually as explained above is no longer necessary. If dia is found in the system path (I think this is new as of LyX 1.6.2) when LyX is configured (or re-configured) the converters are added automatically. So, all you have to do is add dia to the path, then reconfigure LyX. The steps to do this are:

Add dia to the path...Right-click my computer, ->properties-> advanced->environment variables. Find the one named path (I use the system variable named path), click edit. Add the path of the dia .bin directory to this list, prefixed by a semicolon. For me, this was C:\Program Files\Dia\bin (on 64-bit windows, it was C:\Program Files (x86)\Dia\bin).

Once that's done, open the command line and make sure typing dia (from any directory) opens the dia program.

If it does, that step was successful.

Reconfigure LyX...open LyX, go to tools->reconfigure. When it's done, close LyX, and open it again. When you go to tools->prefrences->file handling, dia->png and dia->eps should show up. That's it! Now you can add dia files directly in LyX and they'll be converted properly by the system.

1.3  Categories Converters

Converters DIA to PDF diagrams