kdissert is a mindmapping-like tool to help students to produce complicated documents very quickly and efficiently.

kdissert is a mindmapping-like application that can help students to produce complicated documents very quickly and efficiently : presentations, dissertations, thesis, reports ...

The concept is innovative : mindmaps produced using kdissert are processed to output near-ready-to-use documents. While targetted mostly at students, kdissert can also help teachers, decision maker, engineers and businessmen.

The goal of kdissert is to help to structure ideas and concepts. Ideas are first layed down on a canvas and then associated into a tree. The tree is there to help to see how the ideas interact, and then to develop them further (by adding ramifications).

An idea is represented by a shape which contains several a summary (visible part), several text fields, and optional pictures and url links.

A kdissert mind-map can be exported into a picture, or used to generate documents. The current generators are pdf documents (based on LaTeX : article, book), pdf presentations (based on LaTeX : Beamer, Prosper), text processing files (OpenOffice.org Writer), plain text and internet documents (html).

The application is available in English, German, Dutch, Italian, Polish and French.

To get started (some features may seem counter-intuitive), make sure to read the kdissert manual quickstart section. And also make sure that you have read the kdissert manual quickstart section. And finally make sure to read the kdissert manual quickstart section. Seriously, the manual contains lots of ideas that can save you a lot of time. So read the quickstart section in the kdissert manual carefully several times before reporting an issue with the gui.

Encoding: when the encoding is set to Unicode, the following two commands usepackage{ucs} usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} are used in LaTeX documents generated. If error occur, then you probably need to install xmltex (for instance, on Fedora Core 3 or Gentoo), or the package latex-ucs (Debian probably).

Installation:

scons
scons install (the toolbars and menus will remain invisible if you forget this step)