Freemind Scripting for Markdown Presentation Generation

When I was preparing for the London Tester Gathering workshop I decided to try and fix a flaw in my documentation workflow.

The flaw was - I find it hard to have an overview of my documentation while working with Markdown. I fixed it with Freemind and a custom script.

What workflow?

Currently I use Marp and Pandoc and Pandocifier to create most of my documentation.

write the slides in markdown
process the markdown in Marp to generate slides
process the markdown in Pandoc (via pandocifier) to create longer documentation

But it can be hard to see an overview of my thinking or work.

MindMaps

Mind Maps are very good for providing an overview, but they are less good at generating Markdown.

Freemind now supports exporting to Markdown:

every branch is a heading
every note is a set of paragraphs

This works well if you are using a Mind Map as a document outline.

I don’t use the Mind Map as a document outline. I use it as a thinking tool.

Combined Domains

I realised that I could combine the two domains:

thinking domain with mind map
structured sequential markdown output for Marp

But I’d have to have something that:

procesesed each node in the MindMap
output the note text on the node

Then I can structure my thoughts however I want, and only add notes to those ’thoughts’ which overlap into my slide domain.

Caveat: All slides need to be represented on my MindMap, and in order.

Free Mind Scripting

FreeMind has very capable Groovy scripting abilities:

https://docs.freeplane.org/scripting/Scripting.html

I used a variant of the “Output to CSV” script in the Scripts collection to create the Markdown I needed.

markdownNoteText.groovy

import javax.swing.*;

// for cut 'n paste:
def showDialog(String text) {
    def dialog = new JDialog(ui.frame)
    dialog.setSize(350, 450)
    dialog.setLocationRelativeTo(ui.frame)
    dialog.setDefaultCloseOperation(WindowConstants.DISPOSE_ON_CLOSE)
    dialog.add(new JScrollPane(new JTextArea(text)))
    ui.addEscapeActionToDialog(dialog)
    dialog.setVisible(true)
}

def process(thisNode, childPosition) {

    def result = "";

    def note = thisNode.note;

    if(note){
        result += "\n" + note.plain + "\n";
    }

    thisNode.children.each {
        result += process(it, childPosition + 1)
    }
    return result
}

def result = process(node, 0);
showDialog(result);

This allowed me to have a mindmap with additional thinking information, and the output slides.

The script is also available on github