Alex Gutteridge wrote:
> On 5 Oct 2007, at 10:51, Winter Ayars wrote:
> 
>> I need to create a small program that generates images and "animations"
>> (i can cheat on the animation) of Petri nets. Something like the
>> wikipedia page's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petri_net) examples, but
>> automatically generated based on simple input.
>>
>> I'm thinking about doing this in Ruby (with Gnome 2) but don't know what
>> image generation/manipulation tool would be best to use or if i should
>> go with something else. Does someone have a suggestion? Ideally
>> something with some good documentation. It doesn't have to be
>> sophisticated, just enough to algorithmically generate pictures. I'm
>> planning on using Gnome 2 as well, if this makes a difference.
> 
> Cairo can make nice figures and there are Ruby bindings. The bindings 
> have little (no?) documentation, but Cairo itself is very well 
> documented and there are good docs for the Python bindings which are 
> almost identical.
> 
> I'd post links, but Google is your friend really.
> 
> Alex Gutteridge
> 
> Bioinformatics Center
> Kyoto University
> 
> 
> 
> 
I've seen quite a few Petri net animations on the web -- perhaps you 
could grab one of those and just do the Ruby scripting.