In the paper I have presented at this year's LED workshop, I have shown how diagram completion can be used in order to facilitate a completely novel(?) approach to diagram editing. It is enough to just roughly sketch your diagram. You do not need to hit the mark quite precisely anymore as required in traditional diagram editors. Rather the completion engine computes all ways, how the diagram can be put together. Thereafter, the completion causing minimal change to the layout of existing diagram components is selected automatically! I am quite sure that this feature can boost the accessibility of diagram editors.
Example:
This figure shows how tedious the manual correction of a roughly sketched diagram can be. At least three complex mouse dragging operations are necessary here. The completion engine would yield two results for this example, the diagrams A and B given in the upper row. However, it is quite clear which diagram the editor user would prefer: the one with minimal changes to his components, namely A. A shortcut that automatically applies completion A could greatly improve editing performance.
However: This approach is only possible as long as there are not too many possible compositions of the fragements. For instance, n disconnected NSD statements can be put together in n! ways. As a consequence, the user would have to invoke the completion engine every few steps. Even so, this kind of assistance is still useful.
- S. Mazanek, S. Maier, M. Minas. Exploiting the Layout Engine to Assess Diagram Completions. Proc. of the 2nd International Workshop on Layout of (Software) Engineering Diagrams (LED 2008), 2008. Electronic Communications of the EASST.
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