I've been working on displaying Leo outlines as mind maps, in the hopes that this would be useful, or at least entertaining. I've gotten the work almost to the point where it could be useful.
There are a lot of design decisions to make for a project like this, and one of them is that I will only display up to two levels deep. I have learned over the years that more than this becomes too hard to read on a computer screen. Of course, on paper you use more levels, especially if you draw on bigger paper, or have smaller handwriting than I do. Automatic layout is not easy, but what I have is getting close to being acceptable. Right now it only lays out the nodes on one side of the central image. I will be extending them to both sides soon. You can only show so many in a browser window, so I stop painting them when they would overflow off the screen. The mind maps are constructed with SVG, and any modern browser can display SVG. That makes the (python) code itself a code generator - a venerable endeavor. As a side benefit, the parser can turn any single-rooted indented list into a mind map. In fact, when the code walks a tree in a Leo outline, it turns the tree into an indented list and parses that to feed the map construction machinery. The attached image is of actual output of the system, showing a part of the outline for the ViewRendered3 plugin. Please post any thoughts, reactions, or suggestions you have! Eventually, the thing will probably go into a plugin. I'm not clear yet whether it will work best as part of VR3, Freewin, or if it should be in a plugin of its own. Or maybe it can be incorporated into Leo without needing a plugin. Please let me know your thoughts about this, and about how a user interface for it might work. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/dd962e98-f4c6-4d97-a784-5c6dae08bb4an%40googlegroups.com.
