41–50 of 72 posts
My impression is most people don't know about graphviz and dot, and implement these sorts of tools to fill this (admittedly big) gap.
The 'drawn' -style output is cute. Would be nice if there were dot renderers that did 'artistic' renderings of diagrams.
These ideas always seem to top HN. They are cute, but interactive diagram editors have been around a while and, unfortunately, are just faster to use and are more flexible. Maybe it'd make more sense to just have one of these tools implement export to ACSII?
These ideas always seem to top HN. They are cute, but interactive diagram editors have been around a while and, unfortunately, are just faster to use and are more flexible. Maybe it'd make more sense to just have one of these tools implement export to ACSII?
I think the appeal would be that, since it's text based, it's already supported by git/mercurial/svn/name-your-vcs. A binary format would need some sort of history/diff support inside it to work well with a specific plugin for s VCS. An XML-based format would integrate well with a VCS, but you lose the clarity of the ASCII based diagrams. It may seem "cute" or "toyish", but I woudl try to use it before giving an opin…
My impression is most people don't know about graphviz and dot, and implement these sorts of tools to fill this (admittedly big) gap.
Graphviz is great if you either want to automatically generate diagrams of huge graphs, or if you care more about structure than appearance. But creating pretty diagrams with Graphviz/dot is an exercise in pain. I love seeing more of these tools, and plan to integrate several of them in the scripts I use to build my blog, not to supplant the cases where I use Graphviz, but to augment them for the many situations wher…
I think Graphviz really needs a better routing algorithm - with many vertices and edges the result starts looking like a mass of tangled hair. Something closer to the routing algorithms used in PCB design[1] would be far more readable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Routing_(electronic_design_aut...
These ideas always seem to top HN. They are cute, but interactive diagram editors have been around a while and, unfortunately, are just faster to use and are more flexible. Maybe it'd make more sense to just have one of these tools implement export to ACSII?
Ideally I want a visual editor with an abstract understanding of what you can do in diagrams, a keyboard driven interface and automation of a good first approximation of what I want, giving me the ability to tweak the resulting layout.
Drawing diagrams on a piece of paper or a whiteboard beats both approaches handily. Which is pretty sad.
These ideas always seem to top HN. They are cute, but interactive diagram editors have been around a while and, unfortunately, are just faster to use and are more flexible. Maybe it'd make more sense to just have one of these tools implement export to ACSII?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"since it's text based, it's already supported by git/mercurial/svn/name-your-vcs" But doesn't that still apply if you had a visual tool exporting to ASCII? It'd save you the difficulty of moving sections around in a text editor, but give you the visual diff.
Now you then need to cut and paste back and forth from your documents in order to edit them.
My impression is most people don't know about graphviz and dot, and implement these sorts of tools to fill this (admittedly big) gap.
Graphviz is great if you either want to automatically generate diagrams of huge graphs, or if you care more about structure than appearance. But creating pretty diagrams with Graphviz/dot is an exercise in pain. I love seeing more of these tools, and plan to integrate several of them in the scripts I use to build my blog, not to supplant the cases where I use Graphviz, but to augment them for the many situations wher…
I can beat that - I had an ASP.Net application that queried a set of SharePoint lists to generate 100s of diagrams giving details of what applications were used for different business processes at each site in a large multinational.
It did work but there was a lot of tweaking of the process to create the dot files....