Comand of the day: kig

Each task has a tool. With graphics and figures too. If i want to edit a photograph or to perform some nice effects on an existing image, that's a task for Gimp. If I need some cute artwork for icons, banners, web... I prefer to vector with my so loved Inkscape. When such drawings are not so artistical and need some related and formal figures and diagrams, i normally consider dia, limited but correct. If i want to plot a complex graph i let the task to graphviz's dot and i just declare the vertexs. If I want to plot some program data output, python plus matplotlib is the faster way to process and render it. Automating execution to visualization process is very convenient. Some time ago I used gnuplot for that but python is more flexible towards data formats. Often what you need is to explore such data, interactive visualization can be revealing with tools such as qtiplot.

But my problem today wasn't none of the above but drawing some geometric diagrams (angles, vectors, tangents...) to illustrate some trigonometric equations. I was thinking on QCad but Kig did perfectly. Kig is about doing geometrical manipulation: intersections, angle transportation, angle mesurements, solidarized elements, python scripting...



I was to integrate kig png exporting into WiKo figure generation but i found two show-stoper problems: Command line options for batch exporting seems not to work and there is no way to control the viewport but by resizing the windows and controlling the zoom. While the concept of limited size canvas exists, I didn't find a way to resize it :-( Anyway is worth to dig in such a tool even doing patches to have batch exporting working.

BiBTeX Tooltip in html WiKo output

I was busy yesterday on providing better BiBTeX support for the HTML output in WiKo. I was adding bibliography tooltips. They were an original suggestion from Pau Arumi, and i agree with him that they will be very handy for reading an article in electronic format. The former html bibliography page is still available: just click instead of hovering.

To have it working, you should download the latest wiko version, install 'python-bibtex' debian/ubuntu package and appending to your css style sheet the latest statements of this css concerning 'bibref' class.

Then, just place any bibtex files on the same folder the wiki files are and refer a bibliography entry in the wiki files as '@cite:SomeBibtexId'. By 'WiKonpiling' you'll get both normal LaTeX bibliography and this html equivalent.

Take a look on the final feel at this chapter of my master thesis.

WiKo, the wiki compiler

Pau and me have just released WiKo as sourceforge project. WiKo is a simple but powerful Python script that takes files with wiki content on a given directory and either builds a web, a LaTeX article or a blog.

The script has a very long history before being branded as WiKo. It has its roots on the simple script i did to build most of my websites (Can Voki, Codders, KKEPerians UNLTD...) The script eased keeping static a lot of pages sharing the same layout design. The script was later enhanced to read wiki pages and to build also LaTeX articles. Even I used it for my master thesis. Recently Pau also started to use it for his PhD thesis and he has added great improvements such as LaTeX formulas in HTML output or bibliography linking. And lately we started to use it as internal wiki for some projects we are involved within Barcelona Media. So we thought that such script deserved a sourceforge project, and that's how WiKo born. I hope it can be useful to you all.

WiKo might be useful to you if:

• You have an static website and you are considering to make it dynamic just to reuse design
• You have to write articles to be available in both html and pdf
• You are moving content from web, to LaTeX articles and to blogs and you are feed up of translating markup
• You love wiki syntax but you hate to edit wikis in web forms
• You like LaTeX output but you hate (or don't know) its markup
• You like colaborative environments such subversion and want to use it as base for a wiki
• You still are considering ikiwiki but you would like it was not written in Perl so you could contribute to it ;-)

Also I am currently working hard on being able to use WiKo to edit this blog. I am almost there so stay tunned.