Kivio [LWN.net]

Kivio

Posted May 5, 2004 3:21 UTC (Wed) by busterb (subscriber, #560)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to diagram editors by vblum
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to diagram editors

Kivio is still around, part of the KOffice suite. It is a more dedicated
chart and diagram tool, and is not so good for general drawing. It
supports:

* Layers and object grouping
* Grids, snapping and general alignment
* An extensive stencil set (more stencils can be found in the Kompany's
commercial version Kivio mp, though the free version has quite a few)
* A few general tools; poly and straight connectors that stretch with
connected objects, support captions, width, arrowheads, text
* Kivio mp has a few more drawing tools, like bezier curves, circles and
rectangles. The only real shapes you can draw in the free Kivio are
predefined stencils.
* free Kivio can write PS and PDF (actually, any KDE app can; look at
the PDF printer), but doesn't appear to write anything else. I guess you
could take a screenshot of print preview to get a PNG or such. Kivio mp
presumably can export more formats.

Google around and try them out. Kivio seems more useful for this task
than Karbon14.

For drawing, you might also look at KPresenter; a lot of people at my
work tend to use Powerpoint as a general diagramming and drawing tool, so
why not KPresenter. It at least exports to graphic formats and has a lot
more drawing tools than even Kivio. Actually, it is interesting that
different components of KOffice don't share drawing tools.

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Kivio and theKompany

Posted May 6, 2004 6:03 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

* Kivio mp has a few more drawing tools, like bezier curves, circles and rectangles. The only real shapes you can draw in the free Kivio are predefined stencils.

As long as such important features are held back for the pay version, Kivio will never go very far. I don't mind the extra stencils being held back, but drawing tools? That sort of thing from theKompany makes even Ximian's Microsoft envy look good.

Kivio and theKompany

Posted May 6, 2004 7:51 UTC (Thu) by cloose (subscriber, #5066) [Link]

AFAIK theKompany has nothing to do with the KOffice version of Kivio. They don't hold anything back and they don't work on it.

BTW Peter Simonsson and Nicolas Goutte did a lot of work lately. So I'm sure Kivio will improve.