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Comment by zapzupnz | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I'd be totally sold on actually making diagrams this way than with, say, Dia or draw.io, but I'm now wondering if there could be converters from those programs' native formats to the ASCII format described for Svgbob with a view to using it as an interchange format that can also be quickly converted/previewed using the actual Svgbob converter. That would be spiffy.

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This would be doable. Please contact me if you want me to get this build for your needs

Why not just SVG as the interchange format?

I tend to think of interchange formats as human-readable and free of styling. SVG is definitely human-readable but it's harder to visualise than a well-formatted ASCII diagram, plus SVG marries content and style (text is styled by CSS, for example). The diagram aspect of an ASCII diagram is, I would say, structure, not styling, and so remains suitable for use as a basic interchange.

SVG is great as an interchange for image editing, but I'm not sure that's necessarily what is best suited to basic diagramming. I'm sort of thinking like a diagram equivalent of Markdown.

IMO, SVG is less editable than ASCII diagram when you're in the console

Indeed.

Unfortunately, the world is stuck on CLIs that provide us only with ascii text, although some provide Unicode.

It's 2019, and we're still dealing with side effects of ascii art, a throwback from the 1970s.

ASCII art, Unicode art, it doesn't matter what encoding you use, the result will look the same. Sometimes it's useful to represent things in text — are you going to tell us that if I should want to make a simple diagram in my code's comments, I should embed a large PNG file into a text file in order to achieve it?

Doesn't markdown do this currently? Not by embedding, but by referencing an existing image?

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