This is an old revision of the document!
Table of Contents
SketchCanvas Plugin
Compatible with DokuWiki
Hrun
This plugin enables you to embed sketches in Wiki text. You can edit each sketch in an in-place GUI editor on the browser.
The sketches are formatted in a very simple format.
Installation
Install the plugin using the Plugin Manager and the download URL above, which points to latest version of the plugin. Refer to Plugins on how to install plugins manually.
Prerequisites
- The client's browser must support HTML5 canvas.
If any of your Wiki viewers may have legacy browsers that don't support HTML5, the sketches won't show up for them. 1)
Examples/Usage
The sketches are included by <skcanvas> tag.
When a <skcanvas> tag is included, a sketch is rendered in place of the tag like an image link and an edit button appears below it.
A new button is added to the toolbar in edit page for inserting new sketch. (if you have used EditTable plugin, it works much like the same way)
A simple sketch only consists of a meta element with sketch size information:
<skcanvas> - type: meta size: [200, 100] </skcanvas>
A bit more complex source:
<skcanvas> - type: meta size: [200, 100] - type: rect points: '35,25:137,64' - type: text points: '45,45' text: Example - type: arrow points: '14,46:30,46' - type: arrow points: '142,46:174,46' </skcanvas>
Results in a figure like this:
Syntax
The SketchCanvas syntax is a YAML document. All text between <skcanvas> and </skcanvas> must be valid YAML document.
Configuration and Settings
There is no configuration option yet.
Change Log
- Add CanvasElement.php to zip file to download (2024-01-07 16:10)
- Small documentation fix (2024-01-07 15:45)
- Merge pull request #7 from msakuta/fix-canvas-edit (2024-01-07 09:23)
- Fix canvas editing GUI didn't work for Igor and later (2024-01-07 09:02)
- Bump date in plugin.info.txt (2020-03-22 08:18)
- Merge pull request #5 from msakuta/fix-greebo (2020-03-22 07:37)
- fixes #4 startSectionEdit error (2020-03-22 07:33)
- Prevent an error on https font link (2016-06-25 05:23)
Motivation
If a Wiki system could be a knowledge base that everyone can participate, it must be easy to edit all contents for everyone. If it's not easy enough, people would end up using MS Word to write documents.
We already have edittable which makes table editing easy enough, but it's still awkward to include sketches in a Wiki document.
If you had a decent vector graphics editor such as Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape or even Excel, you can only attach rasterized image files and other people couldn't edit them unless the source is separately provided. So I decided to make a format for sketches that meets the requirements:
- It must be editable with the browser alone (if HTML5 compliant).
- The source is provided as well as the sketch image.
- The format is human readable and easy to compare with text diffs.
There is the svgedit plugin that can do similar things with SVG. So why should I bother reinventing wheels?
SketchCanvas is very different from SVG in several aspects:
- It can be embedded in the Wiki text rather than external image file.
- It has very simple and easy-to-read syntax for humans.
- The syntax is easy to compare and produce meaningful diffs.
- Its functionality is intentionally very limited so that the source text cannot be too complex.
The main purpose is to sketch quick ideas/concepts and not doing artistic paintings.
Roadmap
Blue areas are planned but not implemented yet. BTW, this image itself was created with SketchCanvas.
Known Bugs and Issues
- Toolbars showing in edit page that aren't helpful
ToDo/Wish List
- Increase number of types of primitives