[Cialug] Open Source FlowCharts?

Nathan Stien nathanism at gmail.com
Wed May 23 16:17:41 CDT 2007


On 5/23/07, Matthew Nuzum <matthew.nuzum at canonical.com> wrote:
> Inkscape doesn't have true flowcharting, but (iirc) last year for SoC
> the ability to do "connectors" was added. This lets you have one
> connector per shape. I was using a beta a while back that also had
> some rough routing code for the connectors.
>
> Your flowcharts would look pretty, but it would take an awful lot of
> work to make one with much depth.

Indeed it does.  I used Inkscape to make some state machine flow
charts for a client a while back, and I used those connectors you're
talking about.  The routing algorithm (circa February at least) was
fairly dumb and I had to fight it all the time.  I ended up just
manually dragging the control points for the connector curves so they
would look nice.   Quite a pain.

That day Inkscape was my shiny new hammer, and flowcharting started
looking like more of a nail than it should have...  The eventual
diagram was very pretty, though. :-)

-- 
Nathan P. Stien
Consulting Engineer / Software Developer
Embedded Systems Electronics and Software
http://linkedin.com/in/nathanstien
Mobile: 309.241.2581


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