
ASCIIToSVG: Convert ASCII Diagrams to Beautiful SVGs - ingve
https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg#asciitosvg
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lwansbrough
Really important tip for anyone that wants to show off something that has a
visual output: show the output!

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z3t4
Sometimes the product have not been polished, or it's a concept, so you need
to sell the product before even showing it. Once the customer has made his/her
mind they are unlikely to change it. And then you work with the customer to
improve the product to meet their expectations. Meanwhile if you would have
shown the product/prototype without any selling they would have made up their
mind and never come back or given any feedback. I know you are a busy person,
and so am I - I just want to see the damn output, I don't have time to run it
and see for myself even if it just takes 10 minutes. But if I'm not willing to
do that, then it's very unlikely I'll invest in it anyway, even if it's very
good.

~~~
koboll
>Sometimes the product have not been polished, or it's a concept, so you need
to sell the product before even showing it.

Then, at minimum, you still need to make a mockup of the result

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blitmap
This is also neat: [https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/](https://casual-
effects.com/markdeep/)

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yichiban
Good job! I totally agree with the author on this:

> So I thought, "What if I could combine all these things and start writing
> markdown documents for my technical designs -- complete with ASCII art
> diagrams -- that I could then prettify for presentation purposes?"

If it's intended to be embedded in Markdown documents and published as web
sites, it could be a web component.

I made an experimental one [0] and here's a demo [1].

I'm too lazy to follow through so hoping someone to make a full-fledged web
component for it.

[0] [https://www.webcomponents.org/element/ichiban/ascii-
diagram](https://www.webcomponents.org/element/ichiban/ascii-diagram) [1]
[https://www.webcomponents.org/element/ichiban/ascii-
diagram/...](https://www.webcomponents.org/element/ichiban/ascii-
diagram/demo/demo/index.html)

~~~
gitgud
That's pretty cool. This demo is convincing me to look at using them in my own
projects

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remcob
> Aren't there already things that do this?

> Well, yes. There is a project called ditaa that has this functionality. Sort
> of. But it's written in Java [...]

> So I reimplemented it in PHP. [...]

Who wants to do the NodeJS, Python, Go, Rust and Haskell reimplementations?

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app4soft
> Who wants to do the NodeJS, Python, Go, Rust and Haskell reimplementations?

I already requested as issue[0] Python port. In comments to this issue some
user give me link to `aafigure`[1,2] project, that available as plugin[3] for
AsciiDoc too.

[0]
[https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg/issues/10](https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg/issues/10)

[1] [https://launchpad.net/aafigure](https://launchpad.net/aafigure)

[2] [http://pythonhosted.org/aafigure](http://pythonhosted.org/aafigure)

[3] [https://github.com/hwmaier/asciidoc-aafigure-
filter](https://github.com/hwmaier/asciidoc-aafigure-filter)

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yonilevy
Kinda related, I want an app that takes a picture of a hand drawn diagram and
converts that to SVG (or whatever format I could later edit digitally). That
would be a great way to bootstrap a large diagram, as it seems all diagram
editors lose to pen & paper.

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megalodon
Something like the Live Trace tool in Illustrator but for simple shapes? Would
be really interesting to try to build that.

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yonilevy
Not sure what that is, but probably not -- it should be able to detect simple
geometrical shapes (and label them), lines/arrows between shapes, and ofcourse
text. Perhaps I'll try to build that :)

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yorwba
If you want to look at research papers for inspiration, the term to look for
seems to be "sketch recognition". E.g. this paper for UML diagrams:
[https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/2002/SS-02-08/SS...](https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/2002/SS-02-08/SS02-08-009.pdf)

~~~
yonilevy
link is broken but google cache works, thanks a lot!

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sitkack
See also,
[https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbob](https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbob)

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cryptonector
Nice!

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cryptonector
Tomorrow I'll try this with JavE: [http://jave.de/](http://jave.de/)

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enriquto
But what's the point ? The ASCII version will always be more beautiful !

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cup-of-tea
An existing solution exists but it's written in Java, so he writes one in
PHP... Oook.

