While looking for a tool to organize my thoughts in the beginning of my thesis, I stumbled upon the program FreeMind. This program, although being a free one, is in my opinion by no means inferior to commercial tools like Mindmapper except for one thing: the HTML export of the generated mind maps. Because I wanted to share the progress of my thesis with some people, I surely was not happy with the generated HTML files which lacked most of the features of the original mind map, preserving only the structure and the external links. I therefore sat down and hacked a little XSLT stylesheet to transform the FreeMind-files (which are XML) into HTML preserving most of the features of the original mind maps.
Features transported now are:
To use the stylesheet you need a XSLT processor (e.g. xsltproc). Use this program to apply the stylesheet to the FreeMind file you want to transform (e.g. with xsltproc this would be: xsltproc /path/to/freemind.xsl /another/path/to/mindmap.mm > output.html). If you don't know how to do this with your program then consult its documentation for the correct syntax. Copy the output file together with the files freemind.css, all .png-files and the icons-subdirectory on a webserver and your done (You may open the files locally too. There is no webserver required.). Just open the output file in a browser and see yourself.
The stylesheet is developed under Linux using xsltproc as a test tool. To my knowledge it should work with any standards-compliant XSLT-processor. The output is valid HTML 4.01 Strict. Output was tested and found to be working with the following browsers:
The following browsers were tested and found to have problems with the output:
Click here for an example of the output of the stylesheet.
The script and the supporting files can be downloaded as a tar-achive. Under Linux use tar -xvzf freemind-xsl.tar.gz to unpack it (assuming the use of GNU tar). Under Windows use any Unpack program you like (like WinZip for example). They all should know the tar format. If you use any other system I assume you know what to do.
[Download] Version 0.1
The stylesheet is subject to the rules of the (new) BSD license. This basically means that you can do anything you want with it, including modifying and redistributing it, provided the following conditions are met:
Apart from that I'd like to be notified if anyone modifies this script or integrates it into another software. This is by no means an obligation. I'm just curious :).
