Hacker News Reader

Comment by hansword | Hacker News Reader

I want to snidely remark in an HN thread that if you make a thing that generates visual output, you should show some examples of that output.

View on HN

I've tried it with the logo diagram:

  .-------------------------.
  |                         |
  | .---.-. .-----. .-----. |
  | | .-. | +-->  | |  <--| |
  | | '-' | |  <--| +-->  | |
  | '---'-' '-----' '-----' |
  |  ascii     2      svg   |
  |                         |
  '-------------------------'

A screenshot of the resulting SVG in the GNOME Image Viewer: https://imgur.com/I6NySZp.

owner replied with "Ask GitHub to support insertion of SVG into their Markdown". Perhaps "screenshots" of the output in jpg or png are fine, too.

You can just use svg files in github markdown afaik

That might be 2% snide, but it’s 98% practical advice.

That's not even snide, that's just... basics. Otherwise why waste peoples' attention?

What an odd perspective.

Someone built a tool they thought was useful, and released it under the MIT license in case other people might benefit from it, but not putting a screenshot in the README is wasting people's attention?

Yeah.

"Hey, come look at this thing! It's really great, and makes pretty pictures, but you'll have to trust me on that. Sure, it's worth your time to figure out the issues; my lack of attention to the readme definitely hasn't extended to making this work on machines other than mine, honest."

I think you might be reading into it too much. Unless the README really is saying you should use it, as opposed to just describing what it is.

The readme is there to tell people what the project is about, why they should use it, and the basics of doing so—yes, absolutely. How are you going to get anybody to use your project or contribute to it if you can’t (or don’t) even make it clear why they should care?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com