Show HN: Vexlio – Create precise, beautiful diagrams

in fact there are (at least) a couple of start-ups focused on subscription (recurring payment) management. The one i use is Trim.

this app is useful and paid for itself by a factor of 10 just in the first month

but here's the thing: a very large number of vendors have made their subscriptions resistant to cancellation by these "subscription managers"--even after Trim contacts them, the response usually something like "only cancel the following the tedious manual steps" which even after you do it, you have to check again next month to be sure your cancellation request was honored

Or not pay for v2 because you still have v1 and it works. Or pay for v2 because it has some new features you'd like.

Either way, users lose. One-time purchase means probably less software (and less innovation in the space). Subscriptions means more shitty software and user-hostile business models.

Still, as it is, the expected lifetime of a piece of software is usually much longer than the expected lifetime of a SaaS business. So if something seems like a tool I might frequently use, I'd much prefer to buy it than to rent it - there's a better chance the company will abandon it or die than that the bit rot will set.

The trial version is not time-limited, but it is limited in two ways: each drawing can have a maximum of 30 distinct objects, and exported images/PDFs have a small watermark along the bottom edge.

Save/load/import/export are otherwise unrestricted.

Your idea of generating diagrams from web request data is great! I'll definitely keep that one in mind.

On a related note, it's also planned that you will be able to invoke Vexlio from the command line with a Lua script to programmatically generate diagrams from the shell. That is not yet implemented, however.

Switching between normal and program mode has several restrictions, but at no point will your drawing lose any objects (if it does, that's a bug). Creating objects in normal mode does not generate API calls, meaning in order to interact with those objects in program mode, you need to use the method I outlined in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14555028. Additionally, switching back to normal mode after using program mode will "commit" the Lua commands, and the next time you switch back to program mode, it will be as if the drawing was entirely created in normal mode. This piece is a bit of a pain point for me, so this behavior may change in the future.

Vexlio's interface was definitely inspired by Inkscape in some areas (perhaps most notably, the color bar at the bottom).

Perhaps even better would be a set of instructions that could be piped into some other program to transform into whatever it needs.

That is to say, if you could create a simple parseable format or use an existing diagram lanuage, if one exists sufficiently compatible, then those who want to convert it into PSTricks or SVG or whatever could then base their conversion off your language. Both PNG and PDF don't seem amenable to such a transformation.

One use for this could be using your program to create a basic figure template for some math problem involving a diagram, one whose parameters might change and thus some of the textual content changes without necessarily changing the text. This could be a SVG on the web, for example.

It also would allow for a better integration with particular fonts, etc., in embedding into another document, such as a LaTex document.

Perhaps, at a minimum, since you have a scripting language you use, you could have a diagram to export it as a whole diagram as something in that language. That might be a bit dangerous since ideally your exported language format would not change much and I could see your underlying scripting language would change. Also, ideally the export language should be rather explicit to make it simpler to parse, e.g., a loop to draw concentric circles could just output the concentric circles in the simpler language while the Lua script would naturally be having the loop.