Consider the case of a metabolic pathway. It's a diagram that shows different biochemicals, and they're connected to one another by arrows labeled with an enzyme.
In this situation, you often have several chemicals that can all be converted to something you want to highlight. When presenting such things in linear logical order for explanatory power you'd have all the precursors in a row and then have them all have nice arrows going to the product.
What I had the most trouble with was getting the arrows to combine nicely with curves. Consider something that makes it so that when multiple arrows go to a single connection point, it replaces the arrowheads with a single composite arrowhead. This deals with slight angle issues and color mismatches. Arrow labels were relatively straightforward to get adjusted right, but arrow bodies were not.
In this kind of diagram I also need to often pull a secondary arrow out of the main arrow to indicate a species that was removed, for instance ATP might come in and go out as ADP. This is very tricky to blend right visually, the arrows will be overlapping, they're defined to touch from the center of the secondary arrow to a point on the main arrow, etc. Consider a tool to launch additional arrows (casting both forward and backwards if desired) from evenly spaced control points on a main arrow?
Example of how bad it is when most people do it (this one is typical or above average). If Visio could to those right (don't worry about adding a chemical editor, those are just PNG or vector graphics from ChemDraw 100% of the time) it would make biology so much easier to present nicely.
In this situation, you often have several chemicals that can all be converted to something you want to highlight. When presenting such things in linear logical order for explanatory power you'd have all the precursors in a row and then have them all have nice arrows going to the product.
What I had the most trouble with was getting the arrows to combine nicely with curves. Consider something that makes it so that when multiple arrows go to a single connection point, it replaces the arrowheads with a single composite arrowhead. This deals with slight angle issues and color mismatches. Arrow labels were relatively straightforward to get adjusted right, but arrow bodies were not.
In this kind of diagram I also need to often pull a secondary arrow out of the main arrow to indicate a species that was removed, for instance ATP might come in and go out as ADP. This is very tricky to blend right visually, the arrows will be overlapping, they're defined to touch from the center of the secondary arrow to a point on the main arrow, etc. Consider a tool to launch additional arrows (casting both forward and backwards if desired) from evenly spaced control points on a main arrow?
Example of how bad it is when most people do it (this one is typical or above average). If Visio could to those right (don't worry about adding a chemical editor, those are just PNG or vector graphics from ChemDraw 100% of the time) it would make biology so much easier to present nicely.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Wi...