
Ditaa: DIagrams Through Ascii Art - vmorgulis
http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/
======
dbcurtis
Well, OK, but usually I want to go the other way. How about something that can
take a drawing produced in some sort of reasonable drawing tool and produce
ASCII art that I can include in some kind of ASCII-only file (like program
source.) Originating a drawing in ASCII-art is about as fun as a poke in the
eye with a sharp stick.

Certainly, there is value on ASCII-art to nice-graphics mark-up, but only to
the extent that the ASCII-art is used as an intermediate, human readable,
common-demoninator storage format. Authoring in ASCII-art just needs to stop.

------
akavel
Migrated to github:

[https://github.com/stathissideris/ditaa](https://github.com/stathissideris/ditaa)

(SF.net lists 2011 as SVN trunk date, github lists "13 days ago")

In related work, see also my Go port at:

[https://github.com/akavel/ditaa](https://github.com/akavel/ditaa)

(side by side comparison:
[http://akavel.github.io/ditaa/](http://akavel.github.io/ditaa/))

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Animats
Aw. I wrote a UNIX filter to do that around 1980. It looked at lines of text
three lines at a time, and converted "+", "-", "_", and "|" characters used
together to line drawing characters to make clean boxes, lines, and joins.

    
    
        ┏━━━━━━━━━━┓       ┏━━━━━━━━━━┓
        ┃Like this.┣━━━━━━━┫          ┃
        ┗━━━━┳━━━━━┛       ┗━━━━━━━━━━┛ 
             ┃
             ┃             ┏━━━━━━━━━━┓
             ┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫          ┃
                           ┗━━━━━━━━━━┛

~~~
vmorgulis
It's perfect!

How did you do that?

~~~
Animats
Unicode line drawing characters in a Markdown monospace code block.

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prideout
Markdeep from Morgan McGuire can do something like this too: [https://casual-
effects.com/markdeep/](https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/)

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jordache
From their examples:

    
    
        +--------+   +-------+    +-------+
        |        | --+ ditaa +--> |       |
        |  Text  |   +-------+    |diagram|
        |Document|   |!magic!|    |       |
        |     {d}|   |       |    |       |
        +---+----+   +-------+    +-------+
            :                         ^
            |       Lots of work      |
            +-------------------------+
    

Typing this out is a lot more work than creating it in Visio...

~~~
scarredwaits
Agreed. But check out artist mode on Emacs...

~~~
jordache
ok.. maybe this is only a value add for Emacs users?

~~~
kleiba
org-mode certainly supports it, which is a big plus.

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Corun
Related: [http://monodraw.helftone.com](http://monodraw.helftone.com) is a
beautiful ASCII Diagramming Tool for Mac.

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splitbrain
There used to be ditaa.org which provided access to ditaa via a simple HTTP
API. Unfortunately it seems to have vanished.

~~~
neolefty
My fault. It was running on a free Amazon ec2 instance and I forgot to
transition it to paid when the time ran out. If anyone wants to get it running
again I've still got the domain and can point it to the right place.

I'm on vacation now but this gives me a good reason to get it working again!

~~~
vmorgulis
An idea (don't know if it's feasible) is to compile to JS with GWT and put
that to GitHub pages.

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herbst
> a small command-line utility written in Java

That somehow sounds wrong. Other than that, very cute. I remember when i wrote
a task tracker for myself in school projects and suddenly there was a
requirement to print them out. Creating a ASCII representation was the most
fun part.

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Exuma
Better up your varnish game

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mgr86
not to be confused with DITA: The Darwin Information Typing Architecture[1].

[1]. [http://dita.xml.org/](http://dita.xml.org/)

