gaphor/gaphas

Be able to extend it for building a UI mocking tool

iongion opened this issue · 3 comments

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I'm always frustrated when I need to use wine to start windows programs to do what I want, in an ugly and non-hidpi friendly way.

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like to be able to define my own shapes and control their attributes

Describe alternatives you've considered
Alternative would be to build my own web tool

Additional context
Yes, I am trying to have minimal replication of that the long time dead desktop Adobe Air application was doing, called Balsamiq mockup - I still use the cloud version for work, but that is overkill at home.

image

As you see, every symbol defined has its own attributes UI

  1. How can one define shapes ?
  2. How can one define and control attributes of those shapes using common or custom widgets, that in turn control the graphics of the shape ?

Hi @iongion,

Thanks for the feature request.

Is your idea to build a new tool?

Have you looked at Gaphor? Gaphor uses CSS to shape model elements. Those elements are coded in Python, but can be tweaked by CSS attributes. Gaphor is a more complex in that it's has a semantic model, but I think it contains most of the shapes and CSS you're looking for. If it fits your needs we can always backport it to Gaphas.

Styling core: https://github.com/gaphor/gaphor/tree/master/gaphor/core/styling
Shape code: https://github.com/gaphor/gaphor/blob/master/gaphor/diagram/shapes.py. The draw method can be defined from the actual diagram items, so the shape can differ per UML element. These classes add a nice abstraction over raw Cairo drawing commands.

@iongion Can I close this issue?