Time for TimeLineViewer, ImageComparisonBetweenVersions, Annotate and ZoomIN

Question

This Idea or Suggestion in addition to the PlantUML IDE idea that have already being submitted.  It would be wonderful and Great if the PlantUML IDE, it's image Viewer or Editor Supports the following Features,

• A Time Line Viewer would be a feature to image viewer or editor where in, it would fetch the diagram file (.puml) from the Source Control Repositories like SVN, TFS, GITHUB, and then it would paint or render the different version of the same diagram file (for e.g ClassDiagram123.puml) and the user would be able to visualize the historical changes of the diagram to understand, how the design had progressed through out the life time of the Software Development Life Cycle.
• A Image Compare Viewer Between versions side by side, this feature would be similar to timeline viewer but would enable compare between any two different versions for (e.g) the current version and the previous version.  
• A Annotate Feature would be able to help the user to using this feature during presentations where in which he could use Some Scripting to annotate image like in PPT to ZoomIn or ZoomOut a particular package, animate the flows of Sequence in Sequence Diagram, animate the relationship during presentations and soon.

What do we think or say about this idea?  Hopefully, this feature is made available soon.

Answer 1

Hi,

the request contains a number of epics that are quite extensive to implement. IHMO the chances are low that these features are implemented soon. This is only my opinion and I am not associated to the development team.

The idea of visualizing a software development lifecycle is very interesting, however, the underlying problem of your time line viewer and the image compare viewer is automatic layout of the used graphviz. Whenever you change something in your diagram, the layout mechanism will calculate the new positions of e.g. components. Therefore you will have difficulties to compare two images easily. I did mention this already in my comment to your other request.

BR,

Michael

Link to your other request https://forum.plantuml.net/11166/editor-image-editor-project-hierarchy-organization-viewer