Alcuin

Alcuin is a portable GUI library, based on Qt/C++, that provides developers with the basic features required for a reaction network editor software tool. These features are:

• Add/Remove Nodes to the scene,
• Add/Remove Edges between two nodes on the scene,
• Drag and Move a node and its connected edges on the scene,
• Undo/Redo actions,
• Zoom and Pan on the scene,
• Export a .pdf figure of the scene.

How to Use

The steps to build Alcuin from its source code are as follows:

• Create a directory for your entire Alcuin project. This directory has to be placed in somewhere not admin-blocked and is recommended to have the following file structure:

<root directory>
├── build
├── install

• Clone or download Alcuin source to the <root directory>.

• Download and Install CMake and then open CMake-gui.

  • Select <root directory>/Alcuin-main (where the top-level CMakeLists.txt is located) as the source directory.

  • Select <root directory>/build as the build (binary) directory.

  • Set CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX to <root directory>/install.

  • Click "Configure" button and choose your compiler.

  • At this stage, CMake requires you to set the value of Qt5_DIR to the directory where Qt5Config.cmake and other Qt dependencies are located.

    • NOTE: To build Alcuin, Qt5 development tools are needed to be already installed on your machine.

  • Click "Configure" button time and again until all red variable rows turn into white.

  • Click "Generate" button.

• Now that you have figured out all the configuration settings, all you need is building the project as follows:

  • On Windows, you can either click on "Open Project" button on CMake-gui or open the generated .sln file in <root directory>/build in Visual Studio. Once the Visual Studio is launched, change the configuration to "Release", and build ALL-BUILD and INSTALL.

  • On Linux and macOS, simply go to <root directory>/build and run make and then make install on terminal.

How to Use

To use Alcuin, you first need to:

• Build Alcuin.

• Add Alcuin include directory (<root directory>/install/include/src) to the "include directory" of your project.

• Add Alcuin library (in <root directory>/install/lib ) to the "dependencies" of your project.

Then, include the following header in your script:

    #include "negui_mainwindow.h"

A Simple Example

A simple example of using Alcuin to create a GUI is in /example directory of the project. The steps to build it are all the same as the ones for building Alcuin except that you need to set Alcuin_PREFIX to directory where Alcuin is installed (<root directory>/install).

Here is a preview that shows how the example GUI can be used to create a network:

License

Alcuin is licensed under The MIT License.