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Subject: 
Re: Introducing Lic - Lego Instruction Creator (pre-alpha)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad.dev
Date: 
Tue, 2 Oct 2007 21:45:49 GMT
Viewed: 
9664 times
  
In lugnet.cad.dev, Remi Gagne wrote:
   Hi everyone,

I’ve been lurking here for a few years now, and have been using LDrawfor quite some time. I finally have something worth saying! In the past few months I’ve found time to work on a little LDraw application that I’ve been wanting to develop forever now. I call it Lic (Lego Instruction Creator).

I absolutely love LPub, but I tend to prefer WYSIWYG-based applications, and get frustrated pretty quickly with manually editing LDraw files - which is where Lic comes in.

Lic takes a regular LDraw model as input, and basically generates the same kind of final instruction images as LPub. But instead of meta commands, Lic provides a fully interactive preview GUI, which you use to control page layout. The GUI also gives you a hierarchical tree view of the overall instruction book, which makes navigating the book easy.

Right now, Lic is still in an early proof-of-concept stage. It’s just reached the point where I’m convinced it can work, and work well. There’s not a lot of features or functionality, and it can be a pain to get up and running, but I believe the underlying framework is solid and extensible, and worth building on. I’d like to pass it to you, the community, to see what you think.

I’ve put together a little website for Lic, with more info, screenshots, etc. Given its early state, I don’t want to put up a fully public download yet, but here’s a link where anyone interested can grab a copy. Feel free to pass the link (or zip file) to anyone else you think may be interested.

Before running Lic, be sure to check out the installation instructions. Lic itself needs no installation, but does require a handful of libraries (Python, PyOpengl, GTK, etc). I know installing a bunch of stuff just to run this one app is a lot to ask, but if people find Lic useful and worthwhile, I’ll know it’s worth spending time to streamline the installation. I would never release an app to the general public with such absurd requirements!

What do you think? Is an app like Lic useful, worth developing further? Or should I crawl back to my hole and mind my own business? ;)

Best regards,


Remi

Hi Remi,

Maybe you didn’t know but I am working on a WYSIWYG version of LPub, where there is no manual editing of the LDraw file. So far, almost everything has GUI point and click kind of interface with support for multiple steps per page, and callouts.

It is C++ based and written using the Qt programming tool set, so building targets for the PC, Mac and Linux should be a matter of what platform you build on.

Never one to tell people what to do, I welcome your effort in LIC.

If you’d like to help with LPub 4 instead of LIC, drop me a note. If not, have a great time creating your own application!

Kevin



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Introducing Lic - Lego Instruction Creator (pre-alpha)
 
(...) Hi Kevin, I was hoping to hear from you! Yep, I knew you were working on a WYSIWYG LPub - you've mentioned the idea here in the past. I just had no idea how far along you were, or if you had even started. I tried contacting you a handful of (...) (17 years ago, 4-Oct-07, to lugnet.cad.dev, FTX)

Message is in Reply To:
  Introducing Lic - Lego Instruction Creator (pre-alpha)
 
Hi everyone, I've been lurking here for a few years now, and have been using LDrawfor quite some time. I finally have something worth saying! In the past few months I've found time to work on a little LDraw application that I've been wanting to (...) (17 years ago, 27-Sep-07, to lugnet.cad.dev, FTX) !! 

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