Re: Output of a FLowchart from XML

Hello all,

just wanted to post what we've decided on this matter (even though NBSP
characters have nothing to do with it :o)

After quite a lot of digging, we have concluded that the _layout_ task is
not as big a deal as pagination.  There are a number of ways to get to a
"pretty" flowchart from XML; the one we liked best (except for the
pagination issue) is yEd (http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.htm),
which does a great job of laying out the flowchart once we transform to,
say, GraphML.  The problem with yEd and various other options we've
investigated is they don't handle automatic pagination (where off-page
connectors are automatically generated) which is a requirement given the
large flowcharts that will be generated...

We could find only one application that deals with pagination _and_ has a
reasonable layout engine:  allCLEAR by Proquis
(http://www.allclearonline.com/).  It's not "perfect" i.e. there will still
be a "human in the loop", but it's the best we could find without spending a
great deal of time and money writing our own pagination and/or layout engine
(we may still choose to do this if the demand is there).  allCLEAR has a
text to layout engine that's fairly easy to transform to, and then all we
have to do is open each output file from within allCLEAR, confirm
auto-pagination is enabled, tweak a few things and print...

Thanx again for all your inputs,

...sam