KDissert - Application of the Month

See also the interview with the developer of KDissert, Thomas Nagy and the Flash demonstration.

Review by Bram Schoenmakers

An average student is a busy person, and sometimes doesn't have enough time left to do something for studying. How often do students realise that they have to prepare a presentation for the next day? For people who would like to make a presentation in a short amount of time, there's KDissert.

Mindmaps

At first glance, KDissert is a mindmapping application. I can hear you wondering what a mindmap exactly is. With a mindmap you can collect a bunch of ideas. You can connect two related ideas with each other, so you get a visual representation of the concept you try to describe. This presentation is in fact a tree, with the main idea at the root and its sub-ideas as the children. It is not hard to add a new idea to the whole structure.

Most people work this way when they want to write up an article or make a presentation. We may assume that the main subject of the document is known in advance, because making a document about nothing is pretty pointless. You start with the main subject and add several related subjects and go on with this until you feel that all the aspects of the subject is covered.

KDissert is an excellent solution when it comes to making up ideas and ending up with a document. In a few minutes you make a structure with a mindmap and KDissert will generate a document with this data.

It needs to be said that KDissert does not take care of the graphical representation of a document. It mainly focusses on the content, because that's the most important thing. It is always possible to make modifications to colours, shapes and other graphical elements in a suitable application.

Installation

Before we start making mindmaps, we have to install KDissert first. Maybe your distribution already offers KDissert. If not, it is always possible to download it from the KDissert website.

Note: installing KDissert is slightly different from what you're used to. This is because KDissert is built with Scons and bksys. These packages are equivalent to make and automake/autoconf, which are used in most other program sources.

Despite the fact that KDissert uses another build system, it is not hard to install. After the tarball is extracted, enter the following commands to build KDissert:

./runme.sh
make
su -c "make install"

When these steps are successfully executed, the KDissert icon will appear in the Utilities menu of the K-Menu.

Alternatively, Klik! can also be used by entering klik://kdissert in Konqueror.

Getting Started

kdissert screenshot

To start, double click on the empty field to create a new item. Type the text you want to appear in the item.

When an item is double clicked, KDissert will create a new sub-item of that item. At the bottom of the screen there are two panels which allow you to attach images and detailed texts to existing items. At the right a toolbar with buttons can be found to give items a certain status. For example, an item can be marked as a "good idea" or "needs work", and so on.

When you think you've covered everything about the subject, it is time to export to a document. Go to the Tools menu and select "Generate Documents".

This option reveals the true power behind KDissert. In the dialogue which appears you can choose what kind of file format you wish to have for your document. KDissert supports the following formats:

It will often be needed to edit the generated documents in a suitable application. For example, when you create a presentation, the images have to be positioned to the right spot.

You have just seen how you can quickly generate usable documents with KDissert. You really should try this application when you have to write a lot or when you do a lot of presentations.

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