Make flash plugin from a png

From Gramps
Revision as of 16:44, 12 June 2007 by JohGro (talk | contribs) (Enhancements)
Jump to: navigation, search

This is a guide to creating a Family tree that can be viewed in a web-browser in a convenient way by allowing zooming in and out and navigating the image of the tree.

How ?

Installation of necessary tools

  1. Install swftools: [1]
  2. use the Graphviz plugin to generate a graphical report (see Howto: Make a relationship chart)

Generation of Flash file

Flash is a proprietary format, of which however open implementations exist. You have to install a flash player and a browser plugin, to be able to view a flash file in firefox, konqueror, ...

You can create the flash file as follows:

  1. If the report image is called "report.png", execute "png2swf -o report.swf report.png" on the command line.
  2. There should now be a file report.swf, that can be opened in any browser with a flash-plugin. You can zoom by right-clicking in the image and choosing zoom in from the menu, and you can navigate by "dragging the image" inside the window with your mouse.

This has been done with the resulting family tree of Example 2 on Howto: Make a relationship chart. To see the result, open the file ancestorsAndDescedants.swf with a flash enabled browser, and test it out.

Enhancements

  • It is also possible to use javascript to add zooming by moving the mouse wheel, but he who did it does not remember how at the moment.
  • The .dot file generated in example 3 on Howto: Make a relationship chart contains the web-page addresses to the personal pages of the "Narrative Webpage" report pages, and by generating a pdf with the relationship graph report and using pdf2swf, the resulting flash-file contains clickable links for each individual that should work if teh swf-file is placed in the same directory as the index.html file of a Narrative We Page report. The alternative way of generating from .dot file can also be used. One way to accomplish this is to run
dot -Tps2 report.dot > report.ps
ps2pdf report.ps
pdf2swf -o report.swf report.pdf

The resulting swf-file should now work as before, but with the addition of hyperlinks.