debian man page for mscgen

MSCGEN(1)							   User Commands							 MSCGEN(1)

NAME
       mscgen - Message Sequence Chart Renderer

SYNOPSIS
       mscgen -T type [ -o file ] [ -i ] infile

       mscgen -l

DESCRIPTION
       Mscgen  is a small program that parses Message Sequence Chart descriptions and produces PNG, EPS, SVG or server side image maps (ismaps) as
       the output. Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are a way of representing entities and interactions over some time period and are often used	in
       combination  with  SDL.	 MSCs  are popular in Telecoms to specify how protocols operate although MSCs need not be complicated to create or
       use. Mscgen aims to provide a simple text language that is clear to create, edit and understand, which can also be transformed into images.

OPTIONS
       -T type
	      Specifies the output file type, which maybe one of 'png', 'eps', 'svg' or 'ismap'

       -i infile
	      The file from which to read input.  If omitted or specified as '-', input will be read from stdin.  The '-i' option maybe omitted if
	      <infile> is specified as the last option.

       -o file
	      Write  output to the named file.	This option must be specified if input is taken from stdin, otherwise the output filename defaults
	      to <infile>.<type>.

       -F font
	      Use specified font for rendering PNG output.  This is only supported if mscgen was built with USE_FREETYPE and is ignored otherwise.

       -p     Display the parsed msc as text to stdout.  This is useful only for checking the parser.

       -l     Display program licence and exit.

EXAMPLE
       The language interpreted by mscgen is similar to that of Graphviz dot, using simple text instructions to  add  entities	and  then  message
       arcs.  The following example shows the input for a simple message sequence chart.

       # MSC for some fictional process

       msc {
	 a,b,c;

	 a->b [ label = "ab()" ] ;
	 b->c [ label = "bc(TRUE)"];
	 c=>c [ label = "process(1)" ];
	 c=>c [ label = "process(2)" ];
	 ...;
	 c=>c [ label = "process(n)" ];
	 c=>c [ label = "process(END)" ];
	 a<<=c [ label = "callback()"];
	 ---  [ label = "If more to run", ID="*" ];
	 a->a [ label = "next()"];
	 a->c [ label = "ac1()
ac2()"];
	 b<-c [ label = "cb(TRUE)"];
	 b->b [ label = "stalled(...)"];
	 a<-b [ label = "ab() = FALSE"];

       }

       More information on the input can be found at http://www.mcternan.co.uk/mscgen/.

COPYRIGHT
       Mscgen, Copyright (C) 2010 Michael C McTernan,
				  Michael.McTernan.2001@cs.bris.ac.uk

       This  program  is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
       the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

       PNG rendering by libgd, www.libgd.org.

SEE ALSO
       http://www.mcternan.co.uk/mscgen/

mscgen-0.20							    2011-03-05								 MSCGEN(1)