Yesterday I was create a diagram in Impress. It was a complicated diagram, around 20 small circles and squares, with a lot of connectors between them. I wasted a lot of time to make it look good, making the nodes so they did not overlap, getting the nodes arranged so the closely-connected ones were adjacent, optimizing the placement of the connectors, etc. It was a tedious manual process.
I wish there was a button I could press in the toolbar called "optimize layout" that would do that all for me. This should be possible. Graph layout algorithms are well-known [1]. There are popular open source packages like graphviz that implement some of these algorithms. You define the nodes and the edges and graphviz determines an optimal layout. It should be possible to take an Impress (or Draw) diagram and extract the abstract qualities of the diagram (the nodes, and their connections), create an optimal layout using graphviz and then bring that layout back into the diagram and apply it. I know it could be done by directly operating on the ODF XML. I assume it could be done at runtime as well. Something to think about. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_drawing [2] http://www.graphviz.org/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
