Re: Orgcharts

Elliotte Rusty Harold (elharo@sunsite.unc.edu)
Tue, 27 Oct 1998 11:02:19 -0500


>I'm thinking about the problems of representing graphics with XML. I know
>about PGML, VML, etc., but I want to think about subsets of graphics where
>the computer can completely handle layout. I want to just tell it what
>boxes, lines and labels I want and have it draw them. I don't want to give
>it X and Y coordinates for attachment points, boxes, etc.
>

Back in grad school I used to use an X-Windows program called grtool that
had a simple text based file format for drawing graphs. It certainly
wasn't XML, but it was extremely useful when I needed to write C code that
chunked out hundreds of pages of graphs for different parameter values.
grtool is probably still out there somewhere.

That job converted me to the text-based file format religion. It would
have been much harder to do something similar on a Mac or PC using
something like DeltaGraph with its binary file formats.

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@sunsite.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| XML: Extensible Markup Language (IDG Books 1998) |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764531999/cafeaulaitA/ |
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