Penrose 3.0

At the very least, make the first mention of the product name a link to someplace with a description. It amazes me how often people skip basic things like this.

Good point, thanks! Editing the post now, should have an updated version up soon with a blurb.

Agreed. Its always "Finally we have added xyz support for our abc module, now you can just call mnb by using the cba function!!" while (I believe) 90% of the people reading that just want to know what kind of tool it is.

On topic: This tool to make diagrams using plain text looks great. Definately going to see if I can utilize it in a project.

Example: https://penrose.cs.cmu.edu/try/?examples=graph-domain/other-...

Thanks! And great question; I'd probably say the main missing pieces would be the level of integration and the amount of general programming you can do. The former is kind of difficult for Penrose to compete with; for instance, to let people use Penrose in Overleaf, AFAIK we'd need to get it into the TeX Live distribution, which is pretty strict about what sorts of code is allowed. Specifically, our optimizer is written in Rust which we compile to WebAssembly, neither of which currently seem to be supported in the TeX Live build system.

The latter is something we're working hard on. We're trying to find the right balance between simplicity and expressiveness, and starting to explore options beyond our trio-DSL approach. We don't have great docs on this yet, but we have some experiments with using Penrose as a library in combination with SolidJS: https://github.com/penrose/penrose/tree/v3.0.0/packages/soli...

Nimo here, the other author of the blog post :). Another advantage of TikZ is you can use it directly in LaTeX. TeX integration is something we care deeply about, so v3 introduces an export mode compatible with the svg package (https://ctan.org/pkg/svg?lang=en). Basically we export SVGs with raw <text> elements that LaTeX can style together with the rest of the document. More docs here: https://penrose.cs.cmu.edu/docs/ref/using#export.

FWIW as a non-mathematician: when I hear “Penrose” I think “Penrose Diagram”. The name association would benefit me as a sort of mnemonic: if I saw a binary called penrose on my system, I would guess it has something to do with diagrams (not necessarily Penrose diagrams). Similarly, if I forgot the name of this tool, it would be easy to recall, as there aren’t too many “____ diagram” word pairs floating around in my brain. I give libraries and executables pithy names along the same lines, where one word that isn’t already in use (“Penrose”) strongly associates with another more general word (“diagram”) in my memory.

Look at the VHS tool for example — it doesn’t have anything to do with physical VHS tapes, but it does record a scripted shell invocation as a GIF for embedding in docs and demos and such. Super easy name to remember. See https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs

Would love to hear what diagrams you'd like to make in your notes!

> Why did you chose this confusing name?

The main idea of the project is to generate diagrams from mathematical notations. So we want a name that people can associate with both "notations" and "diagrams." In addition to this, some of us also liked the fact that the name can be broken down into "pen" + "rose" :D.

We're really open to suggestions on names if a new name can help us spread the words on our core idea and the tool. "Escher" was one of the early candidates, too. Let us know!

> Could you justify it in the introduction of the documentation?

Great suggestion! Will do.

> As a mathematician. I cannot get over the fact that a tool called Penrose that makes (according to its documentation) diagrams, does not, in fact, make Penrose diagrams [0]. Nor even Penrose-Carter diagrams [1]

We never got around to make some Penrose diagrams in Penrose, but Penrose is an extensible platform! If you make a lot of them and want to make them in Penrose, join the discord (https://discord.com/invite/a7VXJU4dfR) to chat with us. I'd love to have some Penrose diagrams in our gallery too ;).

Good question! The graph styles you see in those examples can definitely be used to draw directed acyclic graphs (try opening one in the online editor and modifying the Substance file!), but it sounds like you may specifically be asking whether those graph layout algorithms are available in Penrose? In that case the answer is no, but you could write a Style program that does layered graph layout if you want. Unless I misunderstood your question?

Yes, pretty sure, I bypassed uBlock for the page, reloaded and then the examples made sense!

No, that usually brings you to the front of the blog / forum / help page (depending on where you already are)

It can be surprisingly difficult to move from blog to product page.

This is attacking the problem in the wrong place. There are a relatively small number of writers of update announcements but a large number of readers. The readers have relatively low motivation to deeply investigate any one announced product. The product announcers generally have significant motivation to get the right readers to check out the product. So the correct solution here is for writers to realize that they need to address not just current users, but to spare a thought for the much, much, much larger number of people who are not yet familiar with the product. Even better, that's exactly what the writer did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36748426