Tuesday 17 November 2009 — This is nearly 15 years old. Be careful.
Does ditaa do the impossible, or the unnecessary? It converts ASCII-art block diagrams into nice pictures. As the author puts it:
+--------+ +-------+ +-------+
| | --+ ditaa +--> | |
| Text | +-------+ |diagram|
|Document| |!magic!| | |
| {d}| | | | |
+---+----+ +-------+ +-------+
: ^
| Lots of work |
+-------------------------+
After conversion using ditaa, the above file becomes:
I haven’t tried it, so I don’t know where the parsing falls down, but the samples in the doc sure look better than I thought they would...
Comments
My use case for diagrams probably isn't normal but I almost always have some sort of data that I can munge into nodes and edges. (Program call graphs, DB schema, etc) or I make up nodes and edges in a text file. Then I use GraphViz to automagically do the layout and drawing. Works great for me.
... unless you're a crusty Emacs hacker, of course.
I find the idea of translating vector graphics to ascii really interesting, I still hope to implement it someday.
ditaa definitively looks nice, but I've only played with it via the web interface(no java locally). Thanks for pointing it out!
http://yuml.me/diagram/scruffy/class/samples
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