[Pmwiki-users] Working with illustrations -- experience using PmWiki

chr@home.se chr
Tue Sep 14 12:40:23 CDT 2004


Caveat: The suggestion at the end of this post should primarily be thought 
of as a starting idea, i.e. to show that at least something better should 
be possible without too much work.

!!! Easy to create/insert simple drawings/sketches

Another thing that would be really useful when discussing ideas and
concepts would be the ability to easily create a simple drawing or sketch.
I am not suggesting PmWiki should contain a drawing component, -- a
drawing application can get way to complicated. Hopefully there is
something we can do. One suggestion might be to try and create a generic
wrapper which makes it easy to use other programs.

Generally speaking we will have one file format for the source of the
drawing, and another format that is used to showing the image on a wiki
page. In the best of all worlds the wiki server would be able to
automatically convert the source to the image format, but that's kind of
unrealistic.

So the next best thing would be to make it easy for the user to:
* Display image
* Download source of drawing
* Upload new source and new image

For instance, imagine a directive

	[[sketch:flying-car source=flying-car.dia image=flying-car.png]]

where I just invented the syntax without thinking it through..
 
This could render as several parts:
* An image (flying-car.png) is shown
* A download link for the source of the image
* An upload link that lets you upload source and image in one go \
  (preferably without having to specify their names)

If we could get drag and drap to somehow work with this it would be even
better of course. It might also be useful to support that the image shown
on the wiki page is a small version of the image, and clicking on the
image shows you the big version.

As for the file format that is used for the image of the drawing, I think
it would be enough if we only supported 'png'.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr





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