I’m looking around for some software able to generate automatically a mind map, starting from a hierarchical text file, say something like
sun
.mercury
.venus
.earth
…moon
.mars
…phobos
…deimos
and so on…
(dots meaning tabs or something similar)
The resulting mind map needs not to be interactive, I need it just for visualization and printing.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
You could try this tool.
I plugged in your text like this:
sun
mercury
venus
earth
moon
mars
phobos
deimos
And it produced this image:
It looks like Lucid Chart can also do it.
I used to be an enthusiast for this software: www.thebrain.com
It does have an import feature I believe.
However, I ultimately found it lacking.
I wonder if Graphviz would work for mind mapping. It probably wouldn’t be difficult to create a script to convert tabbed outlines to Graphviz format.
You can try it directly in forum posts. dot is default, or you can pass in neato as the engine.
This is the syntax for forum posts:
[graphviz engine=neato]
graph {
Sun -- Mercury;
Sun -- Venus;
Sun -- Earth;
Sun -- Mars;
Earth -- Moon;
Mars -- Phobos;
Mars -- Deimos;
}
[/graphviz]
You could optionally add colors and formatting like this:
{node [style=filled, color=yellow] Sun}
{node [style=filled, color=blue, fontcolor=white] Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars}
{node [style=filled, color=lightblue] Moon, Phobos, Deimos}
FreeMind is a great freeware to create MindMaps: FreeMind
Thank you for the wonderful ideas guys.
I used Graphviz in the past but somehow forgot about it - I guess I’ll start from there.
I’m decent at Python, so if there’s no script ready to do it, I’ll try to make one to convert my list to Dot.
Here’s a script that could be used as a starting point.
it works like a charm, thank you!
GraphViz looks great. Thanks for sharing Josh.
I used to use http://plantuml.com/ quite a bit. I think I am going to start using it again.
Plantuml looks interesting. It also generates mind maps, and works with Org Mode. 
I got a Java error when trying to run it on my laptop, but generated a simple mind map with it through the tool on the home page.
The code:
@startmindmap
* Sun
** Mercury
** Venus
** Earth
*** Moon
** Mars
*** Phobos
*** Deimos
@endmindmap
Inspiration mind mapping software can generate a mind map from an ordinary outline and produce an outline from a mind map.
It’s not free though, and I’m not sure how well it’s kept up with newer applications
this makes feel exactly the same as Database system. in other words, the SQL.
It’s now possible to create mind-maps right in the forum.
mindmap
Sun
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Moon
Mars
Phobos
Deimos
The format is:
mermaid. On English (USA) keyboards, the backtick character is at the top left of the keyboard, right above the TAB key.
mermaid, the forum might add some extra text after it, shown in the second screenshot below.mindmap.Here’s a screenshot of the extra text that the forum might add after the word mermaid.
If anyone has questions, leave a comment below.
Here’s some text that you can copy/paste into a post as a template. Remember to wrap it with triple backticks as mentioned in the first bulleted step above.
mindmap
Sun
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Moon
Mars
Phobos
Deimos
Read more about mermaid syntax in their documentation. It’s possible to create different shapes and use markdown syntax in the nodes.
mindmap
root((I'm a circle))
id)**dreams**(
id))_actions_((
Yay! Mermaid is so handy! This is fantastic, thanks for the update!