PGF/TikZ is able to produce really eye-candy mind maps (see example). However it might be impractical to create the TikZ structure for larger amount of nodes.

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)

Tags: LaTeX, PGF/TikZ, Software

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.