On Nov 13, 2010, at 3:59 PM, Bart Bunting wrote:
Hi All,
This is a little bit of a vague question but was hopeing that someone
may have some pointers.
I am trying to create some business processes with both textual
descriptions of the process in a table format with step numbers and
descriptions etc. I was hopeing to be able to automagicaly convert the
tabular format into a business process diagram.
I was wondering if anyone has done this in the past using org-mode and
bable some how?
As I am blind I can't successfully create such diagrams using drawing
software. It occurred to me though that it should (could) be possible
to create diagrams from sufficient information in a table structure.
The diagrams are the usual flow chart style of thing with steps and descision
points causing the flow to branch to another point. I thought that if
we had something like the following it may be possible to generate a
diagram.
| Step | Description | Next Steps |
|-------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------------|
| Begin | Begin the process | Choice1 |
| Choice1 | Decide if we are big or small. | Big,Small |
| Big | If we are big then do big things | End |
| Small | If we are small then figure out if we are really small or possibly big. | ReallySmall, Big |
| ReallySmall | Yes we are really small | End |
| End | The end. | |
|-------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------------|
This would represent a process where we start, make a choice if we are big or small. If we are big we do big things and end. If we are small we make a choice if we are really small or actually big. If we decide we are actualy big then we go back to the big step. If not we go on to the end.
Anyway just thought I'd ask in case someone had a suggestion how this could be done using org-mode.
Cheers
Bart
This is certainly possible. Eric Fraga has generated GANTT charts from an Org-mode table. His approach uses an emacs-lisp helper function to convert the table to tikz code, and also a LaTeX stylesheet to define some tikz elements. A similar approach might work for you.