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Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

shaky.github.bushong.net

61–70 of 72 posts

Re: Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

#62
I tried it with

    +-----+-----+  +-----+-----+
    |     |     |  |     |    /|
    |     |     |  |     |   / |
    |  *  |  *--+--+> *  |  /  |
    |  |  |     |  |  |  | /   |
    |  |  |     |  |  |  |/    |
    +--+--+-----+  +--+--+-----+
       |              |
       |              |
       v              v

      foo            bar
Close, just needs a little work. Also, is there any way to get a permalink to some specific diagram?

Re: Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

#63
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SVG cannot be entered by humans in the same way this can

To each his own then I guess. Some may enjoy aligning pipe symbols and pluses, I don't.

I don't either, but I enjoy cutting and pasting back and forth, or keeping diagrams in separate formats, or trying to write SVG manually even less.

Re: Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

#64

ditaa makes some much nicer diagrams: http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/

I like Shaky's rough style better

Matter of taste I suppose, but I find the rought style almost as irritating as ASCII diagrams themselves. Both involve a lot of visual noise which is a huge distraction from the semantic content, for me. With something like Shaky, the combination of handwritten-looking text but the perfect consistency of computer fonts just creates an 'uncanny valley' scenario where my focus is drawn to the artificiality of the textural qualities - like bad CG in an old or low-budget film - rather than the assimilating the basic shapes and relationships that they are meant to present.

When I see something like this part of me always silently wonders 'if you think these handwritten-style fonts are so cool, why didn't you write your whole Readme in the same font? Probably because deep down, you know it's actually hard to read, so why make your diagrams hard to read?'

Re: Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

#68
post #22
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a great service, but I'd love to have something I can use locally. A _lot_ of my time diagramming is spent disconnected, transitioning over photos of whiteboards to actual diagrams. Are you aware of anything that is a local client?

There is years ago asciio, works well on linux environments, some distros have it already packaged, otherwise you can pull it from CPAN. Looks something like this: http://wiki.cornempire.net/_media/asciiart/diagram1.png

Asciio should be available as a package. For example, in Debian, it can be installed:

    sudo apt-get install asciio

Re: Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

#69
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This. I would love, as an author and teacher, to keep my flowcharts, diagrams, etc with my book code. Right now I'm using SVG for that, but it's kinda rotten.

It should be easy to do flowcharts in pic(1). It's also more diff-friendly.

GNU pic can target LaTeX directly, if that helps.

Re: Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

#70
post #36

I use this tool almost every day turning sequence diagrams into drawings. https://www.websequencediagrams.com While the "back of a napkin"style is hip, management seems to prefer cleaner drawings. I'd use shakey, if it made "professional" drawings.

PlantUML does the same thing also.

Yeah, PlantUML is really an awesome tool. Also has an online editor: http://www.planttext.com/planttext

Not the greatest samples on there though - better resources on http://plantuml.com/.

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