[instaviz-users] Multi-line text and PDF conversion

[Glen Low]

All

On 19/12/2008, at 8:43 AM, Stephen North wrote:

>
> On Dec 18, 2008, at 6:29 PM, Luc Nocente wrote:
>
>> This graphviz solution is a major pain in the butt…
>>
>>
>
> Hey!!!

In Stephen's defense, he's one of the authors of Graphviz and without  
his 18 years of work, Instaviz would not be. I appreciate his counsel  
and guidance over the last few years working with him on Graphviz. A  
lot of the hairy path routing and planning routines in Graphviz I  
don't think anyone else in the planet fully comprehends.

>
> Seriously, is the proposal to upload .gv files to a server and
> have them made into pdfs there?  hmmm.
>
> Glen must be way ahead of us on figuring out the possibilities
> but it would not be inconceivable to do the rendering via
> cairo and pango etc. on the iPhone itself (I can't believe
> I'm writing this.)

Actually the port of Graphviz to the iPhone uses the Quartz renderer  
plugin, so it can output PDF, PNG, TIFF (?) and JPEG. The export  
function in Instaviz already exports PDF this way.

The other alternative is to run Graphviz on a server somewhere and  
have it convert GV files to the appropriate format, somewhat akin to  
webdot. But I'd prefer a scaleable solution, one that doesn't rely on  
specific servers if possible.

I'll probably marry the iPhone Backup Extractor with Graphviz and  
loose the foul hybrid on the unsuspecting world around the time of  
Instaviz 1.2. Run "Instaviz Helper", it will have the full list of  
graphs from your backups, click on one to view it or print it out.

>
> Here was my first personal computer.  I do not think it could
> run Cairo and Pango simultaneously :-)
>
>

Yeah I doubt my Apple II could handle it either, though it was  
probably a bit faster than your ancient :-)

I'm not likely to port cairo and/or pango to the iPhone. For one, the  
UNIX environment there is, shall we say, minimal. So there's no X11.  
And the graphics rendering is already well covered by the native  
Quartz (CoreGraphics) and UIKit additions.





Cheers, Glen Low


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