This file: README
Date started: January 20, 2011
Last modified: 20 Jan 2011
Copyright (C) 2011 TicTran Corp. (http://www.tictran.com)
Author: Richard A. Karp
*****************legal notice************************
This file is part of Drawpicture.
Drawpicture is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
Drawpicture is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with Drawpicture. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
*****************************************************
The Drawpicture program takes a text, written in a sort of English-like form
(and hence somewhat legible to non-software people). This text provides a
description of the seating on a commercial airplane. Then the program draws
.svg seating chart of the plane, suitable for use in website design.
Not all website browsers can directly display .svg format. Fortunately,
there are open source programs which will convert the .svg format to .png
format, which all browsers seem to be able to handle. We will provide
examples of how this is done for some aircraft types.
Drawpicture also produces output files that can be used to create HTML code
which will make the output picture interactive. For example, mousing over a
seat can display information or call another program. Or seats can be displayed
in different colors, and so on. We will also provide examples of how this can be
done.
Drawpicture has been tested and developed on the Ubuntu operating system,
a flavor of Linux. The output of Drawpicture has been successfully incorporated
in web pages run under the Apache2 webserver. Interactive features have been
implemented under Apache2 using HTML, Javascript, and PHP.
While it is not required, our hope is that anyone implementing a new seating
chart suitable for use with Drawpicture will add that seating chart to our
airline seating chart library. That way, everyone will ultimately be able
to readily produce usable seating charts, opening up another piece of the
market to all comers.
Also, freely publishing any ports of Drawpicture to other flavors of Unix
would be helpful.
Right now, Drawpicture is not under source and version control. Also there is not
a .configure file to check that Drawpicture will compile and run successfully
on other flavors of Linux. So Drawpicture isn't totally ready for the big time!
But it does generally work under Ubuntu. Note that it requires yacc and lex
compatible utilities to be made successfully.
The syntax accepted by Drawpicture is semi-formally described in the file
airplane_description_syntax.txt. To make Drawpicture from source, go into
the directory and run the Unix command "make" with the file "makefile" currently
in the directory.
If you have suggestions for comments, questions, improvements, or any good jokes
to tell, feel free to email them to the me. I'm the author, dick@OpenGDS.org.
Happy drawing!
Dick
