Re: drawing program that can import SVG generated by Railroad Diagram Generator?

[Richard Hamilton <dick -at- rlhamilton -dot- net>]

Hi Robert,

Since I have an occasional need for railroad diagrams, I went to the Railroad Diagram Generator website and tried out their tool. For those who haven't looked at it, this online tool takes a URL that points to an EBNF file and converts it to a railroad diagram.

I'm assuming here that you exported a file from that tool. If you generated the file in some other way, all bets are off:-).

The file that gets exported by the website is XHTML with embedded SVG. Each production rule in the EBNF gets translated into standalone SVG for the diagram with an XHTML paragraph above the diagram with the name and another one after the diagram with the production in text format.

My go-to tool for SVG (Inkscape) can't handle that kind of file, and I'd be surprised if Illustrator could (and your experience confirms that). 

The good news is that the code for each production is standalone, so you could edit the file with a plain text editor (or an XML editor) and cut and paste the pieces you need into another file. If you don't need the XHTML text, you should be able to just grab the SVG instances, put them in separate files, and edit them with any SVG editor. I did that with one of their output files and it worked fine.

You might also be able to do something useful with an HTML editor or even Microsoft Word, but I wouldn't bet the ranch on it. I couldn't get Open Office to do anything except show the text parts of the file; it ignored the SVG.

I hope that helps.

Richard Hamilton
-------
XML Press
XML for Technical Communicators
http://xmlpress.net
hamilton -at- xmlpress -dot- net



On Jan 5, 2016, at 14:33, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> wrote:

> I've got a railroad diagram generated from syntax source code by
> Railroad Diagram Generator.
> 
> I'd like to cut and paste parts of it to manually create something
> more user-friendly. Anybody know which if any tools can handle this?
> 
> I have Illustrator and OmniGraffle.
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