Advice on scripting

[Garry Myers]

Hi,

I'd like to replicate in Applescript/OmniGraffle something I recently
implemented in perl, which basically takes a file and generates output in
xfig.  I take a tab-delimited list like below -

name orientation role

- where name is a text field, orientation is either + or - and role is a
number.

I'd like to take this list and produce in OmniGraffle something like below
for each entry.  The orientation determines the direction of the arrow and
the role number determines the fill color.


       name1            name2
    ___________      ___________
   |           \    |           \
---|            \---|            \---
   |            /   |            /
    ___________/     ___________/


These would be linear representations of genes with the coloring indicating
likely function.  I could then use the magnetic lines etc in OmniGraffle to
link different genes - very cool, extraordinarily useful & not easily done
in xfig.

I could modify my current script to output in XML/OmniGraffle rather than
fig but the XML looks a little daunting.  I'm not very familiar with
applescript so don't know how achievable all this is...I do know that I can
get OmniGraffle to export objects as applescript though but don't know
how/if applescript parses text files...

Appreciate any comments or advice on this and also if anybody has already
done this?  Apologies for any gross ignorance...

Cheers,

Garry.



-- 
Garry Myers, PhD
Microbial Genomics Group
The Institute for Genomic Research
9712 Medical Center Drive
Rockville, Md. 20850

P: (301) 838-5860
F: (301) 838-0208
E: <mailto: gmyers at tigr.org>