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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

What environment cannot render ASCII text but can render SVG? I think converting in the other direction could be a lot more useful.

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This is useful in a plain-text based document system, for producing nicer rendered output. Box diagrams typed up in a man page can be rendered more nicely in a HTML version.

It could also serve as part of the markup input language in a system like asciidoc. The benefit is that the source resembles the output.

In this man page, I have lots of occurrences of

  <-->

http://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr-manpage.html

in verbatim code which could be turned into a nicer arrow.

Also, textual diagrams occur:

http://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr-manpage.html#N-03E5CED9

http://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr-manpage.html#N-027AA48B

For displaying "inline glyphs" made of sequence of consecutive characters there is option to use font with corresponding ligatures baked in, such as Fira Code [0].

[0] https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

Yikes, LICENSE! Full of how it may or may not be sold phrases requiring a lawyer to understand to answer the question, "can I stick this font into a PDF that could end up in some software distro that could end up being for sale". The LICENSE appears to involve users into a contract; i.e. is not a pure license grant. 2-Clause BSD or fsck it.

In a HTML rendering, references to exotic fonts are pretty much a nonstarter, unless you include them in the page.

Actually I use a tool similar to this (ditaa) to generate drawings in an automatically generated reference manual frop ascii code diagrams in source code. There's definitely a good use for it.

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