Specification of a drawing facility for diagram editors

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of a drawing approach for the visualization of diagrams. The approach is tailored to editors for visual languages, which support structured editing as well as free-hand editing. In this approach, the editor developer visually specifies layout behavior. From this specification a drawing facility is generated. With the generated editor, the user may perform incremental diagram drawing at any time. When visualizing components, taking into account geometric dependencies between different components for layout computation is a challenging task. Therefore, we choose the visual languages Petri nets and GUI forms as running examples. Based on these examples, we show the applicability of our approach to graph-based and hierarchical visual languages. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.