[pmwiki-users] Re: [Off-list] Re: PmWikiDraw - A new future?

Ciaran ciaranj at gmail.com
Mon Mar 14 03:06:05 CST 2005


On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 09:48:36 +0100 (CET), chr at home.se <chr at home.se> wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Mar 2005, Ciaran wrote:
> 
> > I'm considering leaving PmWikiDraw2 where it is, and launching
> > PmWikiDraw3 based around JGraphPad.
> 
> I think that'll be fine, and probably also a wise choice. (The reason I
> think it's fine is that people probably haven't had time to create too
> many drawings with PmWikiDraw yet.).
> 
> > - Ciaran
> > (I now have far too many G-Mail invites available, anyone who wants
> > one, gets one)
> 
> If that's serious, my girlfriend could actually use one :-)
> 
> /C
> 
> --
> Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
> 
> 

I've sent you an invite, you should be able to set this up for her and
retrospectively change the email address...
.
Ironically after spending the weekend playing with JGraphPad I've
decided that I don't actually like it! the interface feels quite
clunky and not as responsive.  After playing with it for some time,
I've come to the conclusion that pmwikidraw differs [critically] in
the following ways

 * Lack of Zoom support
 * Lack of proper scaling support +
 * No gradient fills +
 * No arrow-head choice. +
 * No PNG support +
 * No SVG export
 * Confusing text support. +

However! PmWikiDraw is a damn sight easier to use and a lot more
responsive, it also weighs in at about a 1/3 of the download size of
JGraphPad [JGraph on its own is smaller, but JGraphPad has a chunk of
dependancies]
I believe that I can quite easily and quickly implement the problems
marked with a '+'.  The remaining tasks I think are quite achievable,
when I first suggested JGraphPad I was under the (apparently
incorrect) assumption that JGraphPad worked with UML etc
out-of-the-box, but this does not appear to be the case, in which case
the only thing holding PmWikiDraw back is a collection of UML symbols
in its template library.  The key here being eh ability to scale them
to whatever size is required.
For Some unknown reason [well to be fair probably performance reasons,
although personally I've nothing against fixed-point math!] JHotDraw
is based on Integers and heavily uses java.awt.Point.  Now over the
weekend I looked at ways of adjusting the scaling code, and have now
re-written a portion of it to use genuine Doubles on top of the
integer based math, meaning I can now do smooth and accurate scaling
of objects, which is nice ;) [although for some reason I've not got
lines to work properly yet, something to do with having one of their
dimensions being 0-sized ;) ]

I'm now undecided again :) JGraphPad wasn't as good as it first
looked, in fact in a lot of ways I prefer PmWikiDraw, but its
perfectly possible that this is user-bias <g> *sigh*

So in summary the-most-important requirement to make PmWikiDraw really
useful is to fix the scaling code so that the template libraries can
be more useful.  Followed by gradient fills for 'prettyness' and then
differnt arrow-heads to allow for more power when drawing. Followed by
decent menu-support, thats one thing that JGraphPad has that I really
like, I want those drop-downs in PmWikiDraw mmmm :)

One day I'll even get around to release the spline connectors etc that
I have in my dev builds :)

-Ciaran




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