Best way to incorporate background images

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MzunguKichaa
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2015 11:50 am

Best way to incorporate background images

Post by MzunguKichaa »

Dear all,
First of all, thanks for this amazing product. I've been using CMAP Tools for half a year now and it turned out to be highly valuable tool for me.

Now the point that bothers me:
I'm using CMAP Tools 6.01 on Ubuntu 14.04 64 bits.
Most of my nodes consist of formulas. But since I need advanced features like equation groups, aligning etc. currently I do the following steps:
-Prepare my Latex-Code in a nice Editor
-Copy & Paste the Latex-Code in Laeqed, which gives out the result in a png file
-This png file is then used as background for the nodes

All works well, until I want to present my CMAP on a bigger screen like a beamer. The images look horrible, it's difficult to read. One possible solution is to redone all of my .pngs in a higher resolution, manually replace the old background pictures for all nodes and then readjust all arrow sizes and geometries, since the nodes are now several times as big.
To be honest, this would be my *last* resort. In case I need to an even higher resolution, I'd need to redo this procedure for about 100 .png images again.
The other point is that CMAP Tools has a hard run at scaling .png. In gwenview, manually upscaling the pictures gives *much* better results compared to upscaling those pictures in CMAP Tools.

My question is the following:
-As far as I know, it is impossible to set vector graphics as background pictures at the moment. Is it planned to incorporate this feature? Or are there any alternatives to do so?
-Can anyone state if they can reproduce the issue with bad scaling of .png files? If interested, I can of course send some screenshots to show it.
-Are other bitmap formats better suited for CMAP Tools?

Best from Germany,

Malte Röntgen
cmapadmin
Site Admin
Posts: 799
Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2008 2:22 pm

Re: Best way to incorporate background images

Post by cmapadmin »

There is nothing you can do to improve the you are managing the background images. We will look into adding SVG support for the background images.

What is the math editor missing that does not meet your needs?
MzunguKichaa
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2015 11:50 am

Re: Best way to incorporate background images

Post by MzunguKichaa »

Sorry for the late reply, got a lot to do the last weeks...
Thank you for your answer, though!
What is the math editor missing that does not meet your needs?
Actually it suffers from the main problem of nearly math editors - it lacks all the nice features one could use in Latex (in combination with a good editor, like TeXStudio). For example, I'm having a lot equations where I need the align-environment. As far as I know, there is nothing like that in the editor.
Also, I'm dealing with combined super/subscripts. In Latex, I have specified my own command for those things. To make things worse, I need to complex conjugate some of them, which means setting them into brakets and then 'exponentiate' them by a star - in Latex this is just a simple command, which makes working *really* fast.
Are there any shortcuts for doing e.g. subscripts in the CMAP Tools math editor? If so, it could already help me a lot.
The main problem, however, is that I don't deal with only some equations, but a whole bunch of them. Mainly, 90% of my nodes consist of formulae which I can type rapidly in Latex. Using a math editor is quite slow, then.

Best regards,

Malte
cmapadmin
Site Admin
Posts: 799
Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2008 2:22 pm

Re: Best way to incorporate background images

Post by cmapadmin »

You definitely have a more sophisticated use equations than was intended with the equations editor in CmapTools.
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