
Kroki – Convert plain text diagrams to images - type0
https://kroki.io/
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pierrec
This tool seems to unify a bunch of text-to-diagram tools into one, which is a
great idea. It's funny to see them all united, since I recently went on a
binge trying out all those text-to-diagram tools for a project. My use case:
writing articles on DSP including block diagrams [1].

I wanted to write the articles in Markdown and include the diagrams in there,
so text-to-diagram tools seemed ideal. Turns out most of them give ridiculous
layouts as soon as you have loops, with limited options to correct this. Other
are based on ASCII art, so you control the overall layout, but the result
usually has massive, awkward padding between everything. And then there's the
holy grail, LaTeX with TikZ/PSTricks, which can give perfect results, but the
time investment was a little discouraging. Result: I ended up making the
diagrams with a good old SVG editor.

[1]:
[https://www.osar.fr/notes/waveguides/](https://www.osar.fr/notes/waveguides/)

~~~
_sh
Thanks so much for your comment. I've just read (and played around with) your
waveguide synthesis article, which led me down the rabbit hole of Sporth,
ChucK, Soundpipe and now I find myself really excited looking over the
contents of the "Physical Audio Signal Processing" book. I am going to learn a
lot of new stuff today, thanks!

~~~
pierrec
That's great to hear and exactly why the article exists. I'd say the DAFX
papers are the best rabbit hole in this field: [http://ant-s4.unibw-
hamburg.de/dafx/paper-archive/search.php...](http://ant-s4.unibw-
hamburg.de/dafx/paper-archive/search.php?q=)

(And this is not entirely derailing the thread, since many of these papers are
full of block diagrams, and a tool to generate nice DSP diagrams from text
would be pretty useful)

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DonaldPShimoda
This is neat! I might actually be using this soon.

On a related note, CS professor John Regehr recently collected a bunch of
ASCII-art diagrams from various source code into a blog post [0]. (The
relation is that I had initially thought Kroki would be for things like this
due to a faulty assumption of what the title meant by "plain text diagrams".)

[0]
[https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1653](https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1653)

~~~
mogztter
Thanks for sharing this blog post. Svgbob is doing a pretty good job at
converting those diagrams:

[https://demo.kroki.io/svgbob/svg/eNrFlEtvgkAQx-_9FBNPGqJiHxc...](https://demo.kroki.io/svgbob/svg/eNrFlEtvgkAQx-_9FBNPGqJiHxcPJsX0QOIjUeql6WGFtW4LLGGXJjZ8-O6uKEIQ1IqdAwkw89_fPHYA2jXaHRwxaxNgMP0VDT3ECfXBcKn9BU3LNFowQhsacRhSn3HkcyZUaoU8Srm3xnT5iW3-9g5NLsmJIIelRG419j6zxVil1bRdxJjyaTWqtYV1K35nRLSiHLRsRM5HywjEqgGmAQElPsdh-
jHjc-
gR10AAILrLI5b7mHlNPeohcLH_wddlBCuCXUe_IoEoax9A7-8OU_NUGDFIgDqdTgJ0zRr0FAGLAhwm8-qwbcQgVwNVgkm7d22Ce0lAvMDFHha3HHhIxFMRnHDMgcuDFEJhiDaAt2JqeM8Xeky6QqxnY_Qy75pjK4k7U-hJCrEA2wS55Ac7oMNlQulQ7qfgIqGFGrhvEvIIueBhvqYKSis4saStcTVaXHSVDlepOZlbs9ehZU4ncp96yF4TH4NNHZxbl2UglbtyISZW5JxLWY5xjrB0T5yCULorS-w0glMESnfl7QjSbXo7gl3cQCnJIdLhLAL4K0E-l91t-C8CWYOibX0JwS_DGMg0)

~~~
DonaldPShimoda
Oh wow, that's super cool! I'll have to tell John about that! I know he posted
a follow-up tweet where he was playing with converting them using another
tool, I think [0]. Neat stuff for sure.

[0] [http://buttersquid.ink](http://buttersquid.ink)

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pacala
This is a cool service, congratulations for shipping!

Reading through the docs I stumbled upon "All the code is available on GitHub
and our goal is to provide Kroki as a free service.". There has been
definitely a good amount of work spent to build it, and there will be ongoing
maintenance and infrastructure costs. Maybe I'm too naive, but how does the
Kroki team plan to make the product financially sustainable?

~~~
indogooner
From their install page : "Kroki is available as a Self-Managed instance. We
are also actively looking for sponsors to provide Kroki as a free service."

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nathell
Related: [http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/](http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/)

~~~
millette
Also: [https://github.com/knsv/mermaid](https://github.com/knsv/mermaid)

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NightMKoder
This looks really neat! This integrated with something like
[https://hackmd.io/](https://hackmd.io/) would be really great for technical
writing . It could also be great for auto-generating docs or the like, so it's
great to have this be standalone.

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jacobmischka
This looks awesome, essentially like pandoc for diagrams. Looking forward to
checking it out!

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finchisko
You could create images from graphviz for quite long time.
[http://www.webgraphviz.com/](http://www.webgraphviz.com/)

~~~
mogztter
That's true but Kroki is not limited to GraphViz. We support more than a dozen
diagram libraries: [https://kroki.io/#support](https://kroki.io/#support)

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etaioinshrdlu
Are they easily embeddable, eg, on GitHub?

~~~
_ZeD_
relatively... you can make a base64 encoding of the graph and have a png link
like
[https://demo.kroki.io/graphviz/png/eNpLyUwvSizIUHBXqPZIzcnJ1...](https://demo.kroki.io/graphviz/png/eNpLyUwvSizIUHBXqPZIzcnJ17ULzy_KSanlAgB1EAjQ)

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edoceo
Asciidoc plugin? Like PlantUML?

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mogztter
It's planned! I'm the lead developer of Asciidoctor.js so it's definitely one
of my goal to make Kroki available as an Asciidoctor extension :)

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selfselfself
Wow!! Great tool for product managers as well.

