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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: Creating Kivio Stencils
From:       Sean McGlynn <sean () tmiau ! com>
Date:       2002-06-26 22:23:18
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On Saturday 22 June 2002 15:13, David Williams wrote:
> Hi,
Hello David,

> 	I am interested in creating some stencils sets for kivio, to be
> given away for free and prehaps become part of the KOffice
> distribution. It seems that the functionality of Kivio is fairly limited
> without any, and I haven't found any co-ordinated effort to producde
> some.
Several people have said they're going to create some, but I've never seen 
anyone come back and say "here they are!"
Actually, there is the xfig2sml project on SourceForge 
(http://www.sf.net/projects/xfig2sml). That might help you. Don't know what's 
in it though :-)
It might be an idea if the koffice.org website had a central place to keep 
such stencil sets (and instructions on where to add them so that kivio could 
find them). This might encourage such contributions. Just a suggestion :-)

At the moment the koffice.org kivio page just points to theKompany's kivio 
page. Perhaps an intervening page would be in order, stating the difference 
between kivio and theKompany's kivioMP. If I'm not mistaken I believe Shawn 
Gordon (CEO, theKompany) said that the stencils used by the two products 
aren't even compatible anymore (might be wrong on that though :-)

> 	I have looked at the Basic Flowcharting shapes as an example, and
> it seems to be quite striaght forward to create stencils. But I have a few
> questions...
>
> 	1) Kivio was kindly donated by theKompany. Do theKompany still
> maintain it? e.g port it to KDE 3 and add features? I know they also have
> thier seperate KivioMP program. If not does anyone else maintain it? I
> don't want to create srtencils for it if it's going to dissappear...
As David Faure said, I very much doubt that it's going to disappear. It just 
needs more stencils and perhaps a couple of well written documents on where 
people would like to see it go. Maybe then someone will step up to the base 
and move it forward :-)

> 	2)Although it appears simple just to create shapes and set
> connection points, most stencils will be more complicated than this. For
> example double clicking on a basic flowcharting shape brings up a dialog
> to enter text. If I were to develop a UML stencil set, I would want a more
> complex dialog (like in DIA). Presumably I can create dialogs and include
> them with my stencil set somehow? How would I do this? Qt Designer?
Dunno if that functionality is there or not, but this is the kind of thing 
that might be included in a write up of what you would like to do with kivio 
and what's needed that doesn't exist already.

> 	3)I don't notice any use of Python in the Basic Flowcharting
> shapes, but the website says it an be used. How much Pyton tends to be
> needed?
I don't believe any *has* to be used and I'm not even sure if the Python side 
of things is even implemented (I haven't got 1.2beta to look at either :-)
Again, what would you or others like to do with such functionality?

> 	4)Does anybody knopw of any tutorials or guides for creating the
> stencils? If not maybe I'll write one when I figure it out...
I don't know if theKompany ever produced any docs for creating stencils 
(either free or commercial). I know they came out with a "product" for 
building stencils (it's just an export filter for the Sketch program - 
http://sketch.sf.net)
You can look at the pre-kivio SourceForge project (http://queesio.sf.net) 
which has a brief tutorial (which I'm sure is out of date, but might be of 
academic interest).
There's also a few interesting odds and sods in the koffice and koffice-devel 
mailing list archives (http://www.kde.org/mailinglists.html).
Search for 'kivio' and 'dia' in those archives for some info on a dia filter. 
Not sure if it works although it appears to be in cvs anyways :-)
(anyone know if it works?)
Just search for 'kivio' for some general chit-chat.

> 	Thanks for any help you can give,
>
> 		David
Not much help I'm afraid, but for what it's worth you're welcome to it :-)

Cheers,
Sean
-- 
Sean McGlynn
sean@tmiau.com
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