I've used Kivio extensively for years. I have countless FLW files. Those files are now useless to me; lost data. It would seem that I assumed too much about the openness of that FLW file format.

I have been trying to get an FLW file I created in Kivio to a client for over a week. The client just told me to take a hike.

Is there an FLW file converter somewhere? I cannot see that I'll ever trust Kivio to remain available again. Kivio is gone.

I should have gone with Visio. I knew it, hated knowing it, and I ended up refusing to do it (I only ever use Linux). Now Visio is my only option for RE-CREATING my existing-but-inaccessible-data. I don't even own a Windows computer.

Kivio-MP won't touch the FLW format. What else opens it?

To say that I am peeved would be catastrophically understated.

I trusted too much, now I am burned.

I am Walter Wilson, and I am in a pickle that I got into by choosing Kivio.

I'm sorry about the situation you are in.

The problem is historical. Kivio was created at a time when there were no open formats like ODF available. With Kivio 2.x we wanted to solve that problem by migrating the new open formats. Unfortunately the Kivio developers got busy and that didn't go as planned.

Due to that we unfortunately didn't get to create a converter yet. That's also one of the reasons why no new Kivio version has be released yet. I'm not sure how much work it would need to create one (also depends on how complex the diagramms are).

I would assume that Kivio MP from theKompany could possibly convert to other formats (though I'm not sure that got developed much further).

Sorry again for the inconvenience.

kivio developper will create a new format?

will use odf?

Not a new format, it will be ODG from ODF. And hopefully, a FLW to ODG filter will be developed.

Slangkamp, thank you for the perspective, it helps to understand that.

Let me know if you want a tester for file formats. I'm not fond of re-creating data that I already have and I really don't want to have to use Windows/Visio. I'm also decent enough when it comes to testing software and other QA work.

I think maybe it would be easier to add a converter based on Kivio 1.x. KOffice2 is a re-written office suite and new Kivio has nothing to support the old files and stencils. But translate the information decoded from binary files to xml(odg) seems to be not that complicated.

The old Kivio format is XML based. Adding the filter to Kivio 1.6 doesn't make much sense as almost nobody is using that version anymore and there won't be another release of KOffice 1.x.

Kivio is open source software and as such its development is not limited to one person or company. It is open to everyone.
One solution that may not have been considered is to pay for a converter of that file format to ODF or similar so it can be used in newer software. If there are enough people that want this product, finding a company or individual to write this may very well be cheaper than buying Visio (and for some that includes buying Windows).

I just want to point out that since open source is mostly developed by volunteer developers the option of for-pay development is often overlooked. Finding the specs and getting a quote from your local friendly open source supporting company may very well be more attractive than you thought. Just next to my workplace is a company called http://www.freecode.no which does such jobs, I'm sure there are plenty of others.

Naturally the search for a volunteer Kivio maintainer continues at the same time

A donation campain like we had for Krita could raise a few thousand euros. What is needed is someone who is familiar with the codebase to work on that and a good actionplan. The main problem is to find a developer.

I don't know how much money a company would take to develop the functionality. I assume that it's quite expensive and they would have to get into the codebase.

@Sven; I think everyone will assume its quite expensive, but it doesn't need to be. I think the approach I wrote is plausible and thats why I made the suggestion

A professional developer writing a converter (remember, no need to write or read old kivio code is needed!) would not need a lot of time. Days, not weeks. Also something a lot of people underestimate is the cost of Visio or the cost of re-doing the work they did before in Kivio1.

Do you have a cost estimate?

The the format itself isn't that complex, but it needs additional work e.g. Kivio 1.x format just saves references to stencils so an import for old stencils is needed too. I'm not sure there is a 1:1 mapping of the format to odg possible without extending odg.

slangkamp wrote:The old Kivio format is XML based. Adding the filter to Kivio 1.6 doesn't make much sense as almost nobody is using that version anymore and there won't be another release of KOffice 1.x.

Well since the old format is xml based, we'd better do it in Kivio 2.x, I thought it was a binary format for after opened with Kate, it's non-sense characters other than xml code.

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Oh, it's a zip file

I hope volunteers for Kivio are found fairly soon (I wish I was a developer like you guys so I could help out on this.) I'd like to use Kivio for process-flow diagrams (PFDs), single-line diagrams (SLDs) for electrical systems, etc. for my engineering work.

I know I can use a reasonably good 2D CAD application to do this sort of thing, but I'd prefer an MS Visio-style app. like Kivio.