Ditaa: DIagrams Through Ascii Art

Well, OK, but usually I want to go the other way. How about something that can take a drawing produced in some sort of reasonable drawing tool and produce ASCII art that I can include in some kind of ASCII-only file (like program source.) Originating a drawing in ASCII-art is about as fun as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Certainly, there is value on ASCII-art to nice-graphics mark-up, but only to the extent that the ASCII-art is used as an intermediate, human readable, common-demoninator storage format. Authoring in ASCII-art just needs to stop.

Aw. I wrote a UNIX filter to do that around 1980. It looked at lines of text three lines at a time, and converted "+", "-", "_", and "|" characters used together to line drawing characters to make clean boxes, lines, and joins.

    ┏━━━━━━━━━━┓       ┏━━━━━━━━━━┓
    ┃Like this.┣━━━━━━━┫          ┃
    ┗━━━━┳━━━━━┛       ┗━━━━━━━━━━┛ 
         ┃
         ┃             ┏━━━━━━━━━━┓
         ┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫          ┃
                       ┗━━━━━━━━━━┛

Migrated to github:

https://github.com/stathissideris/ditaa

(SF.net lists 2011 as SVN trunk date, github lists "13 days ago")

In related work, see also my Go port at:

https://github.com/akavel/ditaa

(side by side comparison: http://akavel.github.io/ditaa/)

Markdeep from Morgan McGuire can do something like this too: https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/

From their examples:

    +--------+   +-------+    +-------+
    |        | --+ ditaa +--> |       |
    |  Text  |   +-------+    |diagram|
    |Document|   |!magic!|    |       |
    |     {d}|   |       |    |       |
    +---+----+   +-------+    +-------+
        :                         ^
        |       Lots of work      |
        +-------------------------+

Typing this out is a lot more work than creating it in Visio...

Related: http://monodraw.helftone.com is a beautiful ASCII Diagramming Tool for Mac.

There used to be ditaa.org which provided access to ditaa via a simple HTTP API. Unfortunately it seems to have vanished.

> a small command-line utility written in Java

That somehow sounds wrong. Other than that, very cute. I remember when i wrote a task tracker for myself in school projects and suddenly there was a requirement to print them out. Creating a ASCII representation was the most fun part.

Better up your varnish game

not to be confused with DITA: The Darwin Information Typing Architecture[1].

[1]. http://dita.xml.org/