A:
You can try the US mirror
(ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/packages/daVinci)
if transmission from University of Bremen
(ftp://ftp.tzi.de/tzi/biss/daVinci),
the primary server for daVinci,
is too slow. There are even more mirrors, but it may take some time to see a new
release there. So check if the release is up-to-date. You can find more mirror server
by using the xarchie tool which may be installed on your computer
(ask your system administrator if not).
A:
This depends on what you want to do. daVinci is licensed free of charge for
non-profit use (refer to the
license).
So companies and other institutions can use the software for free
for these kinds of application, e.g. to develop internally used software which is
never given to customers (customers are people who pay a company or institution
for their products or service). Bundling daVinci with other freeware
software packages (which are available for no cost) is also considered as non-profit
use.
But if daVinci is used for developing commercial software (which is not
given for free to a third party), or if print-outs of daVinci graphs
are presented to customers (e.g. for prototypes or advertising) or if
daVinci is bundled with non-free software, then a commercial license is
required. Please
write an e-mail
to the daVinci project to get the conditions of a commercial license.
A:
In most cases, the root nodes of the
term representation
are also the root nodes in the graph visualization. But if there
are some edges pointing to a root of the term representation or
if the graph is cyclic, then daVinci may choose another
node as root and the term representation root becomes an ordinary
node with parents. The user currently has no influence on this
behaviour.
A:
The
term representation
is the only graph format currently supported by daVinci, so it is not
possible to write down the nodes first and then the edges (or vice versa).
For a work-around, you can use the
API
of daVinci V2.1 which has a command
graph(update(...))
for updating an already loaded graph. Graph updates are nodes and edges that should
be added or removed. So first you have to remove a probably loaded graph
by sending API-command
menu(file(new))
and then you can send the new graph by specifying its node and edges in the format
of the graph(update(...)) command.
A:
The
term representation
is the only graph format currently supported by daVinci, so it is not
possible to load a graph in adjacency matrix format. A converter from matrix to
term representation format is not extremely difficult (a great exercise for students
:-), so maybe some daVinci user is interested to write such a tool. Please
inform the daVinci project by
e-mail
in this case.
A:Status files
are only generated by daVinci itself. They
contain the complete system state and can be loaded in a later session
to restore a previous one. There is no documentation of the status file
format, because no other program except daVinci is supposed
to read these files. In fact, even the daVinci developers do
not have a documentation at hand, because a status file is simply a
dump of the complete internal data structure of daVinci that can
be reloaded easily. Further, the status file format is changed
with each daVinci release because of new features, so a backward
compatibility mode is needed to read old files.
A:
If you press the Help button in a daVinci dialog window or use
the Help/ menu and nothing
happens in Netscape then check the Netscape command specified in menu
General Settings dialog
(which is usually 'netscape').
Locate this Netscape command (e.g. with 'which netscape') and look at that
file. If it is a shell script installed by your system administrator, then
make sure that the script passes the arguments to Netscape. This can be
done in the following way:
#!/bin/sh
exec <filename_of_netscape_binary> $*
Otherwise daVinci cannot tell Netscape about the document
requested by the user.
A:
Open the
General Settings dialog
with menu
Options/General Settings...
and look at the content of field Online Documentation:. This specifies
the URL-prefix which is passed to Netscape. It should point to the topmost
directory of the daVinci online documentation, usually located in
directory $DAVINCIHOME/docs (do not use shell variables such as
$DAVINCIHOME in the dialog, Netscape does not understand this).
Change the URL-prefix in the dialog to point to the online documentation,
press Apply and save the options with menu
Options/Save Options.
If this does not work, remove your options file with rm ~/.daVinci
and start daVinci again.