Conference bulova::decw_jan-89_to_nov-90

1206.0. "Wanted: a graphical editor with Boxed text and Connections." by HPSRAD::KOMAR (Stable is a word invented so we could sleep at night) Mon Jul 31 1989 17:00

	Ever since I left Carnegie Mellon to work at Digital, I have
	been wanting a graphical tool that will help me draw diagrams
	that are composed of connected boxes of text.

	I have used SIGHT, and hated it because it is so hard (slow,
	etc.) to edit text, and the postscript rendition was bad
	(broken words with arbitrary amounts of whitespace.)  I have
	tried DECWrite, which was better, but doesn't support boxed
	text easily (draw the text, draw the box, group them), and it
	doesn't have any support for "connections", that is, lines
	whose endpoints are associated with boxes, not points on a
	screen.

	I have also used "terminal graphics" and PSART to create smooth
	postscript renditions of boxed text.

	I've tried a Macintosh (tm) package called Design (tm), but
	it can't read from text files, nor is it integrated with any
	of our applications at Digital.

	Lots of CAD applications have support for connections,
	(routing them on the fly, and all that good stuff, eg.
	WorkView, Valid, Chroma).  I'm not a CAD or hardware
	engineer, and I don't want to deal with all of the extraneous
	stuff that comes along with those applications.

	My current approach is to hack the NeTed test/demo
	application to read a textual description of a graph, provide
	a simple layout for it, and then let me edit the result.
	NetEd, however, doesn't have any easy way to scale boxes to
	the given text strings (create a NodeType with a given box
	size, then create an instance of that type For all difference
	sizes of text strings).  Nor is it obvious how to cause all
	of the text in a box to be centered.  It seems that it will
	require a lot of (tedious) programming to create what I need.

	Why isn't there a general editor for graphs?  Many folks
	could/would use it, and many more would like to incorporate
	it into their applications, if the interfaces were
	documented.

	I'd appreciate your thoughts and any pointers to graph
	editing programs.

	Thanks for your time,
			Paul Komar.
			VAXCluster Technical Office.