Great product, more suggestions for the future.
* Export to PDF
– Option to add Table of contents, with clickable link to each page
* Element control
– Ability to rotate any element freely i.e. like Visio, certainly make using arrows a lot easier
* Export to DHTML
– Page map/list for jumping between pages
– Mechanism for people to be able to post comments (thinking about how to use this tool for effective collaboration) – this is something I would need to flesh out in a lot more detail.
My alternative is to consider a much more expensive product with collaboration support or to do a ‘hack’ that would do the job.
My hack would be to run process after the generation of the DHTML to add some extra bits to index.html that would add comment support to the generated file and convert to an asp.net page.
Could you perhaps add a Plot settings page specific to the 4UI file, an offer a ‘Post export to DHTML command’ (perhaps for PDF and Image as well) option which can call an executable i.e. ‘c:DoThis.exe %1’ where %1 is the full path of the plot file. This would be the start of additional properties/settings that I’m sure will be added in the future.
This would also require tracking of the current page in index.html JavaScript, via a global variable.
I’d like to have a page map, but could add this manually as page 1, but would need more flexible control over arrow positioning.
Cheers,
Tim
4 answers
Tim, thanks for the useful suggestions 🙂
Table of Content in PDF exporting, good idea and accepted.
Rotation of element, good point again, but only a few elements can support this, since HTML do not support rotation 😛
Yes we may need a page navigation menu (map) in the simulation.
Interesting thought about the “Post Export Command”, it make me recall the similar option in Visual Studio. Sure we will consider this.
Hi Xavier
Well I’m no HTML/CSS expert, and have now googled and discovered rotation is not supported easily. Support for rotating Line, Rectangle, and Arrow Line would be a good start though as they are exported as images!
Thanks for your consideration on other items. Now all you need to do is make ForeUI extensible like the Visual Studio add-in model and we’ve got a real winner 😉
Cheers,
Tim
Perhaps you could look at implementing something similar to ‘Tools -> External Tools…’ in Visual Studio. This may have limited use for most people, but I intend to write a simple .NET wrapper for the 4UI file XML to be used for automating some additional document generation and my addition of comment/feedback support to the generated DHTML.
A lot of value can be added to your application by supporting addons.
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