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Comment by sstanfie | Hacker News Reader

Penrose looks great. Beautiful diagrams and readable code. What are some other text-driven diagramming languages / tools? I know of:

https://mermaid.js.org/ https://graphviz.org/ https://flowchart.fun/

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D2 is my current favorite: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2

D2 is scripting language primarily for non-free back-end. Opensource back-ends give inferior results with it.

http://pikchr.org/ is great

Mermaid has been nice to use. It's very much in a beta phase still, with some odd quirks and missing documentation. I'm excited to see where it will be in a year's time.

The fact it's supported natively by GitHub gives it a huge advantage over the others.

In GitLab too

MetaPost. Shameless plug for my own introduction page: http://www.learnmetapost.com

https://www.plantuml.com/

Another approach may be https://google.github.io/typograms/

Anyway, I think that mermaid.js have an advantage there in a lot of environments as it is supported by a lot of markdown renderers, I would like that ChatGPT one does that too.

I assume the future is an LLM where you specify everything in plain english...

yup but ... right now things are in a bit of a primitive state.

i have tried a lot of stuff with the ChatGPT Wolfram integration and it just fails all kinds of ways. its really cool when it works, but a lot of time it just gets really confused and cannot do basic things like "make that line black instead of red"

it already works really well with gpt4+mermaid.

Tikz

Asymptote[0] is excellent IME.

[0] https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/gallery/

For quick flowchart I use https://www.websequencediagrams.com/

Here's a page listing several more: https://text-to-diagram.com/

This page was made by the company behind D2, so not exactly an unbiased source.

https://sequencediagram.org/

D2 Lang is a nice one:

https://d2lang.com/

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