I’ve written a small C program that creates a PGF/TikZ LaTeX file out of a VYM (View Your Mind) XML export. So far this tool has only very basic functionality. Neither it handles UTF-8 explicitly, nor XLinks. Also it doesn’t add any alignment code to the LaTeX file yet, so you have to do some manual editing.

Download

• Vym2TikZ source tbz2 (2.4 KiB, 2008/08/01, cc-by-nc-sa, requires libxml2)
• Vym2TikZ c source code only (5.0 KiB, 2008/08/01, cc-by-nc-sa, requires libxml2)
• Vym2TikZ binary (3.1 KiB, Linux, 2008/08/01, IA32, dynamically linked against libxml2, compiled under Ubuntu 8.04)

Example Usage

1. Create a mind map with VYM and save it as *.vym. (example: test.vym)
2. Select Map > Export > XML… and export your mind map. (example: test.xml)
3. Call Vym2TikZ: ./vym2tikz test.xml test.tex (result: test.tex)
4. If you want to run PDFLaTeX directly (and don’t include the tex file) you have to add an additional header to test.tex. Also you might have to add alignment commands like [clockwise from=0]. (edited file: test_edit.tex)
5. Finally call PDFLaTeX and view the PDF file. (see image on top)

All you have to do is to Drag And Drop this button: to you Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar. Lets say you visit the page http://prola.aps.org/ and want to view certain publications. Just click on you new bookmark and you’ll (hopefully) will be redirected to the corresponding DocWeb-proxy page. That’s all. You will need to enter your MyTum account info once per session (user: YourName@mytum.de, password: YourPassword).

Interactive fitting is fitting a set of data by supplying the initial guess values just by clicking on the plot. You also can use libiap for completely different tasks in your own scripts. Just Have a look at the demonstration program of libiap…

Demonstration

Here is a step-by-step introduction of the demonstration program.

Step 0

Download libiap-20080628.zip (2008/06/28, cc-by-nc-sa licence) and extract the *.zip file. Run Gnuplot and type “load demo1.gnuplot”.

Step 1

This screen only displays a superposition of four randomly generated Lorentz peaks. Press “y” on your keyboard if you want to generate a new set of data. Press “n” or just “return” to proceed. Hint: The default answer is always printed in capital letters. “return” accepts this default.

Step 2

To make the fitting procedure more interesting a small amount of noise is added to the actual function. You can see the generated data in “demo1.dat”. Press any key on the keyboard to continue.

Step 3

Select the minimal x value you want to consider for the fit. You could use this feature to suppress peaks you don’t want to be fitted.

Step 4

Now select the maximum x value.

Step 5

Click on the baseline of your spectrum (“offset”).

Step 6

Select the first peak by clicking on its maximum. Actually you’d have to click slightly below, but the fit usually converges anyway.

Step 7

Select the full width at half maximum of your peak. The green line is right in the middle of the baseline and the maximum. So click somewhere on the intersection of the green line and your peak – or where you think the peak should intersect the green line.

Step 8

After selecting the FWHM you’ll be asked if you want to add more peaks. You can do so by pressing the “y” or “return” key. This will repeat step 7 until you have selected all peaks (four in the demonstration).

Step 9

If you have selected all peaks, press “n” in order to start the actual fitting procedure with the guesses you just made.

Step 10

This screen shows your initial guesses again. Should look quite good already.

Step 11

So now here’s the final result – without typing a single number! The fit results are written to “demo1_fit.gnuplot” as a Gnuplot script. You can easily load this file into your post-processing scripts and use all results there without having to fit the data again.

The screenshots have been made with Gnuplot from CVS and the wxWidgets terminal “wxt” (which looks much better than the usual x11 terminal).

Pitfalls

• The demonstration “demo1.gnuplot” needs write access to the current directory, because it stores the sample data in a file called “demo1.dat”. It also generates a file called “demo1_fit.gnuplot” with the fit results.
• Don’t call “gnuplot demo1.gnuplot” directly. This wouldn’t give you an interactive gnuplot shell and close right after the last plot has been displayed.

Known bugs

• No bugs know yet. If you find any please let me know (preferably already with a solution ).

Downloads

• libiap-20080628.zip (2008/06/28, cc-by-nc-sa licence)

If you have never used Gimp I recommend first looking at the tutorial at http://adrian.gimp.org/gimppipe/.

Usage

First create a new image with one layer (grayscale or transparent RGB, depends) and draw/copy your brush. Keep in mind that the center of your image will later be the center of the rotation. Eventually you have to move the brush layer to archieve this.

Next start the script which can be found in Script-Fu/Layers/Multi rotation if it is properly installed (see below). Now select what the maximum rotation angle should be. I suggest 360 degree for rotating things and 180 or 90 degree if your brush has higher symmetry. Just play around with the settings.

After this you might want to resize the image because the canvas has been enlarged in order to fit the rotated layers.

Finally save your brush as a Gimp animated brush *.gih in you Gimp brush folder.

When I created this script I didn’t know that was already another one created by Rob Antonishen which more or less does the same. It can be found at http://ffaat.pointclark.net/.

Installation

Just download the script below and copy it to your Gimp script folder. On Linux/Unix systems this usually is:

~/.gimp-2.4/scripts

and on Windows systems it should be somewhere in

C:\Documents and Settings\Your User\gimp-2.4\scripts

Can’t remember the exact location. It has been a while since I have used Gimp on Windows…

Download

• multirotate.scm (22 B, Gimp 2.4, GPL)
  

Known Bugs

After the script created the new layers you need to select/click a different layer in order to update the Gimp image window.

By the way, this is my first Scheme script. So I’m glad that it works (for me) at all.

Features

• Raise/Lower Volume
• Mute/Unmute
• Displays the current volume on-screen using osd_cat

Usage

Open the script file with your favourite editor edit following to lines to fit your needs:

CONTROL="Front" CHANNEL="Front Left"

CONTROL is used to set the volume and CHANNEL to get the current volume. Run amixer to see which is the right control and amixer get YOUR-CONTROL to select one channel listed there.

As I am using the compiz-fusion window manager along with the XFCE desktop I decided to use the built-in functions of compiz to bind the keys.

In the CompizConfig Settings Manager select the General Options sub-dialog. Inside the Commands tab find three empty slots and bind them to:

PATH-TO-THE-SCRIPT/avolctrl.sh down PATH-TO-THE-SCRIPT/avolctrl.sh up PATH-TO-THE-SCRIPT/avolctrl.sh toggle

Finally bind those command slots to your multimedia keys. For me these were:

XF86AudioLowerVolume XF86AudioRaiseVolume XF86AudioMute

Prerequisites

• amixer: In Ubuntu you need to install the alsa-utils package.
• osd_cat: In Ubuntu you need to install the xosd-bin package. Source code can be downloaded from http://www.ignavus.net/software.html.

For a different Linux distribution you need to find the appropriate packages your self or compile the binaries from the source code.

Download

• avolctrl.sh (2 KiB, GPL)

Troubleshooting

In case the keys don’t work, check if your keyboard sends events to the xserver using xev. Additionally you might have to define the keys properly using xmodmap if it does not work out-of-the-box. Following codes are working for me (Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard)

keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume

Known Bugs

• No bugs known yet. As I said, very quick’n'dirty hack but should work anyway.