## 3 Getting started ¶

Msc-generator is a program that parses textual chart descriptions and produces graphical output in a variety of file formats, or can embed in documents, such as Word or PowerPoint. It currently supports three kind of charts: Message Sequence Charts (MSCs, this is where the name of the tool comes from), Graphs using the graphviz language and Block Diagrams.

On Windows Msc-generator is installing as two applications: `Msc-generator.exe` and `msc-gen.exe`. The first is called the MFC GUI that can use OLE to embed charts into PowerPoint and Word documents and is supported from version 2.2. The latter implements the command line, but when invoked as `msc-gen.exe --gui` the CLI GUI starts, which supports alt-text embedding, see more on this in Office integration. You can start both GUIs directly. Clicking on a file with .signalling, .graph or .block extension starts the MFC GUI. You can also double-click a chart OLE embedded in a document to edit it in the MFC GUI.

Msc-generator is also supported on Debian Linux (package `msc-generator`) and on MacOS (`brew install msc-generator`). On these platforms only the CLI GUI is available.