Re: [lmi] Generating screenshots automatically

[Vaclav Slavik]

On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 16:45 +0100, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
>  Unfortunately I don't see how to do this automatically because the
> placement of these annotations usually needs to be carefully chosen
> manually to make them nicely looking or even just readable.

I'd expect the techniques used for labels placement in GIS
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_label_placement) to give good
results here too -- it should be a simpler task, because we want the
labels only around the screenshot, not all over the map. But I never
tried, so it's at best an educated guest.

>  A variation: create a DIA file containing the screenshot and the text
> boxes with the help text. 

...and instead of generating it from scratch, only update the manually
tweaked files and preserve placement changes.

> Then you could open it interactively in DIA, drag
> the text boxes around to position them nicely and add arrows as needed. I
> suggest DIA because it's the only tool I know but maybe there are other,
> better choices too. In particular maybe we could generate SVG -- are there
> any nice SVG editors around? 

A generic SVG editor is less useful than DIA -- DIA understands
*diagrams* and you can e.g. drag a label without having to worry about
the arrow, it will be updated automatically. That's not the case with
generic vector graphics editors.

> I only know of Inkscape (and only because it uses wx) 

FYI, it uses gtkmm, not wx.

Regards,
Vaclav