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[Aaron Trevena <autodia droogs org>]

> From: John Edstrom <edstrom@teleport.com>
> On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 11:40:24PM -0600, Lars Clausen wrote:
> > On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, John Edstrom wrote:
> > > I'm thinking of spitting out some data as digraphs.  I looked at the
> > > xml output from simple graphs and think that I can figure it all out,
> > > but I'd rather spare myself the learning experience.
> >
> > Have you looked at the various programs available in the Links section of
> > the webpage?
> >
>
> Yes, but only briefly.  I"m still just casing the joint at this point.
> AutoDia is the closest that I've seen to what I want, but I'm not
> really interested in UML.

Cool - what else would you be interested in. I happen to be hacking
autodia this weekend and am working on dia->graphviz and vice versa.
Hopefully I can use similar code/logic to allow graphviz, argouml and dia
to interact.

As far as most of the autodia code is concerned diagrams are just
diagrams containing nodes and relationships - its should be easy enough to
add some classes or re-organise the internals so that different diagrams
with different types of nodes and edges can be produced/processed.

> Layout is my main concern, more than rendering or manipulation.  I use
> the perl Graph::Directed module which, happily enough, writes xml
> and/or 'dot' files ( from the graphviz package).  With the right
> arguments dot will figure out a reasonably well-balanced layout for
> the digraph and dump the coordinates of the nodes and edges.

I have just been looking at this, I have already done some simple
calculations to work out aproximate coords for dia diagrams that autodia
uses already.

> I figure it shouldn't be too difficult to convert or rescale the
> dot-calculated coordinates into dia coordinates which would give me a
> better renderer of the same graph.  If that's the case then my strategy
> is to convert from dot >>-> ( xml | xsl ) >>-> dia.xml.

Hopefully autodia 1.4 will allow for dia ( not laid out) -> dot -> dia
(laid out). I don't know how much time you have to hack perl - but it
would probably be easier to transform dot to dia using perl than XSLT
which is unwieldy for most tasks beyond rss to html.

Anyone wanting to discuss dia related tools like autodia might want to
email me off list, as I would like to set up a site / list for such
topics. I hope that connecting users and develoeprs of graphviz, dia,
argouml and the like would make for cooler tools and better integration.
Failing that I can just use everybodies code in my plan to take over the
world *cough*.

regards,

A.

-- 
Aaron J Trevena - Perl Hacker, Kung Fu Geek, Internet Consultant
AutoDia --- Automatic UML and HTML Specifications from Perl, C++
and Any Datasource with a Handler.     http://droogs.org/autodia