@hackage mmsyn40.6.4.0

The "glue" between electronic tables and GraphViz

         ***** Usage *****
         -----------------
  1. After installation the executable mmsyn4 is created. Afterwards, it is used to process files. So, open an office spreadsheet program, e. g. LibreOffice Calc.

  2. Begin to enter the text in the cells. You can use Unicode characters. No quotation marks should be used, instead use some special delimiter except '@' sign.

  3. Do not use colons, instead when needed switch to the nearest cell to the right.

  4. To make a text visually highlighted (yellowish), start the cell with an ’@’ sign.

  5. Lines in the table create different chains in the resulting graph. To produce an arrow to the text in the cell, enter it in the next cell in the row to the right.

  6. To make several arrows from the cell, switch to the next cell to the right for this parent one (the cell that will be a parent for several other cells), enter needed new texts there and in the located below cells.

  7. Usually, you can search the needed text with Ctrl+F if needed.

  8. Empty lines in the table do not influence the resulting visualization. Above each line, except the first one, there must be at least one filled cell. It must be located above the text on the new line or even further to the right above. Otherwise, the program will produce no reasonably useful output.

  9. After entering all the text, export the sheet as a "*.csv" file using colons (':') as separator in the working directory. Otherwise, the program won’t work.

  10. Run the appropriate executable mmsyn4 in the terminal or from the command line while being in the directory with the created .csv file. Specify as a command line argument its name. While executing a program enter a basic name of the file to be saved. DO use alphanumeric symbols and dashes if needed. Then specify the needed visualization scheme by specifying the appropriate character in the terminal and the format of the resulting visualization file (refer to GraphViz documentation for the default list of formats). For more information, see the GraphViz documentation.

  11. Your first visualization is then created.

  12. Save the spreadsheet document as a spreadsheet file (if you worked with spreadsheets, otherwise this step can be omitted).

  13. Repeat the steps from 2 to 12 as needed to produce more visualizations.

  14. Afterwards, you have a list of graphics files, a list of .gv files as source files for Graphviz, and a saved spreadsheet file. Then you can use the produced visualizations for some other documents.

    ***** Usage of the Next Command Line Arguments after the First One *****

Since the version 0.3.0.0 mmsyn4 supports the following further command lines arguments (given after the first one -- see above):

-c... -- dots are instead of one letter to specify the first character of the GraphViz command (e. g. 'n' -- for 'neato')

-f... -- dots are instead of two letters to specify the format (according to the 'getFormat') of the GraphViz command (e. g. 'jp' -- for 'jpg')

Since the version 0.4.0.0 mmsyn4 supports the following further command line arguments (additionally to the previous ones):

-b... -- dots are instead of the basic name for the created files (the name without prefixes and extensions)

-s... -- dots are instead of one digit to specify the GraphViz splines functionality. 0 -- for "splines=false"; 1 -- for "splines=true"; 2 -- for "splines=ortho"; 3 -- for "splines=polyline". The default one is "splines=true".

-y -- (if present) means that the '@' signs will be removed from the created files.

They can be given in any combinations (if needed) or omitted. In the latter one case the program will prompt you the needed information (but this is not the case for a separator, which must be specified in such a way to be used instead).