Vidicarta

An organization chart, a family tree, a bill of materials are some common examples of hierarchical data. Each item of such data can have text and/or a picture. Vidicarta draws charts representing these hierarchies automatically. Each item is represented by a box which contains the text, picture and any other information arranged into rows and columns. Parent-child items are connected. The user only enters the text and the picture file name for each item.

The program can be script driven to get this data from a database. Vidicarta uses proprietary placement algorithms (patent pending) to compute the page on which an item's box needs to be placed and the position at which is to be placed. These algorithms take into account the paper size. They provide cross-referencing from one part of a drawing to its continuation on a different page. They can also break the text in order to fit a certain size or they can increase the box dimensions to fit the text, all depending on the user's needs.

Vidicarta takes only minutes to draw a chart that consists of a hundred 8.5 x 11 inches pages once the data has been entered. If the page setup is changed from portrait to landscape redrawing takes the same amount of time. When using a program like Visio to draw such a chart, the user has to drag and drop shapes from a library to represent each item.

The user has to pretty much decide where each item is to be placed and make the connections between items. Placement help is minimal: space items evenly, align items etc. If the page size is changed then the whole effort has to be redone. All this is done automatically by Vidicarta which could be visualized as an automated draughtsman.

The page size can be very large. In general it is easier for Vidicarta to place drawings on larger sheets than smaller. Vidicarta also allows pages of the layout to be saved as bitmap files so that a collage can be created without printing.