[Sigia-l] 3-D workflows

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

Ralph Lord wrote:
> Either we have one giant
> confusing diagram (and no plotter to make it more bigger), or we have
> several documents with "contact points" labeled that cause 
> confusion. (What
> is circle "C" on page 3? Oh, that's where the output goes 
> back into page 6.
> Where? Here, down in the middle of the page, see the other 
> circle "C"?)


You are looking for a third "dimension" because 'length' and 'width'
aren't good enough for your needs. But a literal z-axis spacial 'depth'
may not be the best solution.

For one, you can use colors. I often color code my diagrams, so if a
single box in a giant 2-dimensional flowchart represents a more complex
process on another page, I simply make the small box a distinct color
and a larger box elsewhere in the diagram with the full process has the
same color as a background, almost like you've zoomed into the box to
see the process within it.

Another approach is to build hyperlinks that jump around the document.
If a box in the flowchart represents a jump to another page, simply have
an HTML hyperlink on that box that, when clicked, moves the view to an
anchor on the other page. This is easily done within Visio, and you can
easily mimic this functionality in a PDF, imagemapped HTML/GIF, or Flash
presentation.

I think that the value of displaying diagrams in a literal 3D format is
overrated. It makes for a very fancy visualization, but more often than
not the third dimension doesn't add anything to the actual understanding
of the data (beyond the very real value of making the diagram fun to
look at, which we cannot underestimate).

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
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