[Tex/LaTex] a good BPMN tool in Tikz

diagramstikz-pgf

I'm looking for a nice package (or tool) to write BPMN diagrams directly into my documents. However, I had no luck so far.

I found several tools that may help doing the diagrams, and then exporting to SVG or PDF directly. However, I want something more native to LaTeX, like Tikz.

I found this question, but is deleted and I have no access to it. (Also, I'm not sure if this question doesn't belong here, and that is why that question got deleted in the first place. If that is the case, putting some kind of message in this question would be a good idea instead of just sending the question to oblivion.)

Also, found a couple of initial directions, like:

But I couldn't find a full package that may help doing a full diagram, and easing the maintenance, or work load to start from scratch to create diagrams.

Any help or pointers on where to look are appreciated.

Best Answer

Have you seen tikz tikz-bpmn package here? https://github.com/behnaaz/gdeploy/blob/master/francegrilles/tikz-bpmn.sty

Examples of how to use it can be found here: https://github.com/behnaaz/gdeploy/blob/master/francegrilles/slides.tex

>     \node[event] (start) {};
>       \node[task,node distance=3em,right=of start] (updglite) { Update \\ all nodes };
>       \draw[sequence,->] (start) -- (updglite);

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[Tex/LaTex] A good tool to make electronic schematics and export them vectorially

Wow, I find it unusual that nobody mentioned the best tool around (my opinion) to do high quality Latex schematics (not too hard to learn, best circuits guaranteed) - it's Circuit_macros which are created and maintained by professor J. D. Aplevich.

Examples can be found here, and helpful installation tips are here. You can find manual in every Circuit_macros distribution. Commands for drawing are those of pic drawing language, and macros for electrical elements are written in m4 macro language. After writing down schematic in this combination of languages (pic, m4), file should be preprocessed with m4 macro processor leaving pure pic drawing behind. .pic. file is after that easily transfered in PSTricks or TiKZ/PGF (first couple pages of manual).

One thing that makes Circuit_macros so much more usable and faster is Cirkuit program (written by Matteo Agostinelli), in which you have the ability to preview the schematic while you are drawing it. There are always binaries around for Linux (although probably not for newest version), so the installation is straightforward. Here's how it looks like when you're using Cirkuit to draw schematics.
Problem with processing every following schematic with m4 and dpic manually, can easily be avoided using special LaTeX command \mtopgf defined on the 5th page of the manual.

alt text

[Tex/LaTex] Outlining (filling) glyph outline with text in TikZ

Update 2012-04-10: There's a preliminary package for this on the TeX-SX Launchpad site. You need to run tex on the file pgflibraryshapes.letters.dtx to produce the TikZ/PGF libraries. To generate the font files themselves, you need x2svg.pe font (uses fontforge) to convert to SVG format and svgtopgf.pl font.svg prefix > <fontname>-<fontshape>-paths.tex to convert the SVG to PDF paths (the prefix should be of the form letter@<fontname>@<fontshape>@). Take a look at letter-shapes-test.tex for a sample. The normal and italic shapes for the STIX fonts are already converted. Due to the licensing, they are called stikz!

Do you want something like this?

traced letters

Here's the source code:

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{%
  svg.path,
  decorations.text,
}

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=.3]
\draw[decorate,decoration={text along path,text={AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA}}] svg "M707 0h-255v19c36 0 43 2 55 9c8 4 14 15 14 24c0 15 -7 42 -19 70l-41 94h-262l-46 -114c-5 -13 -9 -30 -9 -42c0 -31 22 -41 70 -41v-19h-199v19c58 6 67 27 126 167l206 488h20l246 -563c28 -65 42 -86 94 -92v-19zM447 257l-116 275l-115 -275h231z";
\draw[xshift=25cm,decorate,decoration={text along path,text={aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa}}] svg "M442 66v-28c-30 -38 -56 -48 -90 -48c-37 0 -59 20 -64 73h-1c-53 -60 -102 -73 -145 -73c-62 0 -105 38 -105 104c0 52 31 91 70 117c30 20 67 39 180 81v54c0 62 -33 90 -78 90c-40 0 -70 -22 -70 -49c0 -18 6 -21 6 -42c0 -19 -20 -41 -46 -41c-21 0 -43 19 -43 46
c0 26 16 58 51 80c28 18 70 30 115 30c56 0 94 -16 118 -45s28 -50 28 -111v-191c0 -46 13 -66 31 -66c16 0 26 5 43 19zM287 127v141c-62 -22 -103 -43 -128 -66c-24 -22 -34 -46 -34 -77c0 -53 30 -77 69 -77c20 0 41 5 58 16c29 20 35 34 35 63z";
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

The method of producing this was fairly straightforward. I loaded the font in fontforge and exported it as an SVG font. That then gave me the fonts as SVG paths. Since TikZ can accept SVG format, I could then cut and paste that in to a TikZ document. That lot could be done beforehand so that there was a file with the paths already specified.

Edit (2012-01-29): I had occasion to want to do this with fairly arbitrary letters so semi-automated it. It's not "production" ready, as there's still the odd bit needed to make it truly usable with no extra tweaking, but it's at the usable-if-you-know-what-you're-doing stage.

Convert the font to SVG. You need fontforge installed. Then the following script, made executable, will invoke fontforge and convert the font specified on the command line to SVG format (output saved in the current directory). Eg if it is saved as x2svg.pe (note the extension) then run as x2svg.pe /path/to/font/amazing-font.otf.
```
#! /usr/bin/fontforge -script

Open($1)
Generate($1:t:r + ".svg")
```

Extract the glyph paths from the resulting XML file. The following Perl script does a reasonable job: it should trim excess whitespace at the start and end as well. Also, one could do with a better naming scheme (I tried unicode, but that got confusing).

perl -MXML::Twig -e '
$xml = XML::Twig->new(
twig_handlers => {
glyph => sub { $n = $_->{att}{"glyph-name"}; $n =~ s/_//g; print  %% "\\svgletter{" . $n  . "}{" . $_->{att}{d} . "}\n";}
}
);
$xml->parsefile("amazing-font.svg");
' > amazing-font.letters.tex

Then in the TeX file, we just need to input this file and use the paths. Here's an example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{svg.path}
\newcommand\svgletter[2]{%
  \expandafter\def\csname svgglyph#1\endcsname{svg "#2"}
}

\input{TeXGyreSchola-Bold.letters}

\def\STOP{stop}
\def\NOTHING{}
\def\empty{}
\newcommand\outline[1]{%
\outlinelet#1\STOP}

\let\thisis\newpage

\newcommand\vfillornewpage{%
  \ifx\thisis\vfill
  \let\thisis\newpage
  \else
  \let\thisis\vfill
  \fi
  \thisis}

\newcommand\outlinelet[1]{%
  \let\next=\vfillornewpage
  \ifx#1\STOP
  \else
  \tikz[baseline=0pt] \draw[scale=0.09,ultra thick] \csname svgglyph#1\endcsname;
  \let\next=\outlinelet
  \fi
  \next}


\begin{document}

\outline{Outline}

\end{document}

With result:

outlined font in TikZ

Obviously, one could be more adventurous in the actual use of the path. Also, it would be good to have a more systematic way of getting the right scale factor (perhaps measuring the height of an "x"). Don't expect kerning!

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] A good tool to make electronic schematics and export them vectorially

[Tex/LaTex] Outlining (filling) glyph outline with text in TikZ

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