Svgbob – convert ASCII diagrams to SVG, now with styling support | Hacker News Reader

Svgbob – convert ASCII diagrams to SVG, now with styling support

ivanceras.github.io

161 pointsivanceras33 comments

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I recently wrote an editor for this:

https://mbarkhau.keybase.pub/asciigrid/

excellent! created something sensible and relevant just doing what seemed obvious.

Try this

_______

< Meow >

-------

        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

https://imgur.com/a/Og0vYAv

This is cool, except the alignment is wrong in almost all diagrams. Labels are off center, things overlap, etc. If that were fixed, it would be very nice and usable.

Yes, this is indeed the only reason I couldn't use this otherwise great tool yet.

See my comment here: https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbob/issues/11#issuecomment-5...

Also check out Markdeep, which provides this (and a whole lot more) via JS: http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/#features

What a great idea! I have been using a text to UML sequence diagram tool and this seems to be very much along the same lines.

What is the name of the tool?

PlantUML, probably.

Its a Mac app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sequence-diagram/id1195426709?...

A thread from 9 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19857349

Also 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14422777

Nice. I'd like the other direction. SVG -> ASCII

You could rasterize the SVG with imagemagick then use aalib to create ascii art from that. However the quality of the result would doubtlessly depend on the nature of the SVG in question.

with your support and enough given time, this can be done.

That seems pretty great, but I always have the problem of creating the ASCII art in the first place. Is there a tool to help with that?

For general chart drawing (box, lines, arrows, text) I've used asciiflow[0] a few times.

[0] http://asciiflow.com/

I can second that. It also supports import which I then use to update documentation.

The best I've found is emacs picture-mode.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ba...

Here is a good summary:

http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_ascii_diagram.html

I love how after all these years I can still find out random new things about emacs I didn't know. It's a treasure trove of capabilities.

I really liked monodraw but am reluctant to pay for a license now that it's more or less been abandoned. I still like it, but only bought a copy for work at megacorp and foolishly didn't put it in my name.

I'm not sure I understand this attitude. It's a pitty it failed commercially. But it's a great app that only costs a tenner and works well (probably way better than any available alternative). And it can "save" as text, so it's not like you're going to lose all your work.

Surely, a good investment for anyone above minimum wage who does ascii art periodically on a mac?

What makes you think it's abandoned? The author is active on Twitter, the last update for dark mode was in May 2019 and I don't see any show stopper bugs or crashes on Catalina. Small utilities like this don't need an update every month. I bought it a while ago because

1) It's very cheap and a great show case for a small niche Mac app that's both beautiful and works well

2) The two times per year I use it, it's already worth it and fun to play around with.

https://blog.helftone.com

What makes you think it's abandoned?

The last blog entry I saw was that it's been put into maintenance mode. If your interest has fizzled but you still want to keep the product out there, that's a great use case for open source. I'm just not that inclined to pay for something that's not being actively developed.

Obviously at some point last year it got a new feature (yay). That speaks to the app itself being feature incomplete.

Shameless plug: https://mbarkhau.keybase.pub/asciigrid/

If you're on a mac, try monodraw. It's discontinued, but it's cheap and works great (it's basically a full featured diagramming app – with text output).

The website itself is an interactive editor, for what that's worth

Sometimes works with https://www.asciiart.eu

For example: https://www.asciiart.eu/cartoons/felix-the-cat

Seriously, that is very cool! I wonder how PlantUML diagrams would look in Svgbob or Markdeep, if they were imported from text.

Nice ! Now I just need to be able to have org mode source blocks for that .

This is pretty impressive. Are there builds for a cli?

Well the project's workspace defines svgbob and svgbob_cli crates so probably.

yes, ive seen that. was just wondering whether/where there are prebuilt binaries i can download directly

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