
Asciiflow - giis
http://www.asciiflow.com/
======
standeven

                                     +----------------------+
                                     |        Just          |
                                     |----------------------|
                                     |                      |
                                     |                      |
                                     |                      |
                                     |                      |
                                     +----------+-----------+
                                                |
             +------------------+               |                 +----------------------+
             |      an          |               |                 |        example       |
             |------------------|               |                 |----------------------|
             |                  |               |                 |                      |
             |                  |<--------------+---------------->|                      |
             |                  |                                 |                      |
             |                  |                                 |                      |
             +------------------+                                 +----------------------+

------
lewish
(Site owner here) Sorry that the site is down, it's hard to deal with spikes
of traffic like this without over provisioning!

Just thought I would chime in, I'm working hard on a complete re-write of
ASCIIFlow, killing GWT and moving to canvas + JS while keeping the ASCII look
and feel, adding tools to resize things, and making the canvas size infinite
and most importantly, supporting mobile!

Please get in touch if you have requests.
[https://github.com/lewish](https://github.com/lewish)

~~~
akavel
Thanks for the great tool! By the way, is there a chance you would consider
setting up a custom copy of ditaa on your server? The ditaa.org server seems
dead quite long already (some year at least, I think? or is it just me?),
unfortunately... Also, I'm kinda working on a Go port of ditaa
([https://github.com/akavel/ditaa](https://github.com/akavel/ditaa)), but it's
totally work in progress still, and just one of many hobby projects I push
forward only from time to time...

------
shmerl
Nice, but it could be better if it allowed using Unicode box drawing
characters as an option: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-
drawing_characters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_characters)

~~~
ygra
The name wouldn't be very appropriate, then.

~~~
shmerl
Well, not exactly. For example box drawing characters are included in some
extended ASCII tables: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-
drawing_characters#DOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-
drawing_characters#DOS)

I don't think it won't fit the name at all as an extra feature (though it only
makes sense to use Unicode for that purpose).

~~~
rspeer
"Extended ASCII" is not ASCII.

It's a dated phrase referring to various one-byte-per-character encodings that
include ASCII as a subset. Now that UTF-8 exists and is widely used, those
encodings are useless until you decode them into Unicode anyway.

~~~
shmerl
So what? It's still called extended ASCII. The point is, using Unicode box
drawing characters on that site would be appropriate.

------
craigching
Man, I wish I had this back in 1992 designing UIs for MS-DOS :) Very nice!

~~~
richardw
Damn, a customer. One of my final school projects in '91 was a text drawing
program. Using it, I was amazed what effects I could get with text, background
and foreground colours. Amongst other things it had line drawing, box fill
with fg or bg colour.

~~~
craigching
Actually we made use of extended ASCII for our UI at the time ... you know,
the solid bar/solid double bar, etc. So this isn't _quite_ where we could have
used it, but it's pretty close!

------
ozh

      +-------+-----------+----------------+
      | Also  | supercool | to draw tables |
      |-------|-----------|----------------|
      | id    | yeah yeah | this all day   |
      | stuff | and so on | long :)        |
      | time  | i could do|                |
      +-------+-----------+----------------+

~~~
TeMPOraL

      | not             | as         | cool    | as             | orgmode    |
      |-----------------+------------+---------+----------------+------------|
      | awesome         | table      | drawing | speed          |            |
      |                 |            |         |                |            |
      |                 |            |         | awsome!        | auto-align |
      |                 |            |         |                |            |
      | emacs           | rocks      |         | good shortcuts |            |
      |                 |            |         |                |            |
      | lots of exports | latex      |         |                |            |
      |                 | html       |         |                |            |
      |                 | text       |         |                |            |
      |                 | and others |         |                |            |
    

(drew that in 90 seconds)

~~~
ozh
yeah, but... emacs. Would love something online to draw tables, though.

~~~
ozh
Hoooo, found something neat: [http://www.sensefulsolutions.com/2010/10/format-
text-as-tabl...](http://www.sensefulsolutions.com/2010/10/format-text-as-
table.html)

I'm going to fork this to make sure it never disappears from the intarwebs

------
kruipen
See also [http://search.cpan.org/dist/App-
Asciio/lib/App/Asciio.pm](http://search.cpan.org/dist/App-
Asciio/lib/App/Asciio.pm)

------
StevePerkins
Given that the site is now slashdotted, can anyone please mention what it even
is?

~~~
Blahah
It's a Javascript version of artist mode in emacs - you can draw diagrams
using ascii-art like you would in a vector design program.

~~~
sebastianavina
sorry for my ignorance, but what is the practical use for this?

~~~
pmr_
I do a lot of geometry related programming and the ability to add some graphic
illustrations directly into the source code comes in handy every now and then.

Also, everybody needs a small ascii graphic in the output from time to time.

EDIT: Language.

------
jiayo
This reminds me of TheDraw, back in the BBS days.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw)

~~~
voltagex_
Try PabloDraw for a more modern version -
[http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/](http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/)

Also, it seems to support multiple people drawing collaboratively via a server

~~~
nwh
I've used the multi user mode, it's extremely good.

------
wlievens
People wgo like this should check out ditaa. It's similar but then again very
different.

~~~
tofof
Perhaps that's why it has a ditaa button to do the transformation.

------
mikeroher

        +-------x---------------------------------------------+
        |     xxx                                             |
        |   xxx                      xxxxxx     xxxx          |
        |  xx                        x    x    xx             |
        |xxx                              xxxxxx              |
        xx                                                    |
        |                           xxxxx     xxxx            |
        |                               xxxxxxx               |
        |                                                     |
        +-----------------------------------------------------+
        |                                                     |
        | xxxxxxxxxx         xxxxxx    xxxxxx          xx     |
        xx          xxxxxxxxxx    xxxxxx    xxxx xxxxxx xxx   |
        |   xxxxxxx          xxxxx       xxx    xx        xxx |
        |xxxx     xxxxxxxxxxxx   xxxxxxxxx xxx   xxx xxxxx    |
        |x                                   xxxxx xxx   xxxxx|
        +-----------------------------------------------------+

~~~
novaleaf
i don't get it.... ???

~~~
talklittle
Sun, birds, river?

~~~
AndrewGreen
Frogger?

------
tsumnia
I used this site about 2 years ago when working on a CLI for my old company.
Love it and can't wait to use it again.

edit: And we just ddos'd it.

------
dded
The first schematic editor I ever used displayed with Regis graphics [1] on a
VT125 terminal. But it only used a small subset of Regis. One escape sequence
would put the terminal in a mode that mapped the 8th-bit set bytes to a bunch
of arc- and line-segment glyphs that were entirely sufficient to display a
circuit schematic. (And the 8th-bit clear bytes retained their ASCII encodings
for labels.)

Drawing with these characters was very similar to these ascii drawings: one
byte gave you a piece of a line (or an arc), and you built a grid of them. The
schematic editor took a simple here's-the-grid-coordinate-of-an-element
representation of the schematic, adjusted the offsets of the glyphs of that
element, and built-up the grid of bytes to send to the terminal.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS)

------
vitoralmeida
This is definitely a useful tool to embed diagrams on source code.

~~~
CalumJEadie
Really interested to know if you embed ASCII diagrams in your source code /
store engineering diagrams in your project repos?

My take is that the closer documentation is to the code the more useful it is
and more likely it will be updated. Would be great to have your feedback on a
side project in this area, a chrome extension / web service to turn Umlet
diagrams into SVGs when you're viewing them through GitHub. Check it out at
[https://github.com/CalumJEadie/umlet-
github](https://github.com/CalumJEadie/umlet-github).

------
robgibbons
I shit a brick when I realized you can copy and paste entire selection areas.

------
daviddaviddavid
I love this.

One issue: I seem to get the same behavior from "right angle" line mode and
the "diagonal" line mode. I would have expected the latter to use the forward
back slash characters.

~~~
eridius
There is no "diagonal" line mode. You're probably confusing that with the
arrow line mode.

~~~
novaleaf
it would be interesting if they could get a diag mode working though :)

~~~
ygra
Well, there's still JavE for those things: [http://jave.de](http://jave.de)

------
ozh
Got the inspiration for some web app searching, finding, forking and tweaking:
[http://ozh.github.io/ascii-tables/](http://ozh.github.io/ascii-tables/)

------
MacsHeadroom
Aaaaaand it's down. "503 Over Quota"

Anyone have a mirror?

~~~
el_duderino
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.asciiflow.com/)

~~~
avdd_
unhelpful

~~~
_mhr_
Try this instead:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20131205044817/http://www.asciif...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131205044817/http://www.asciiflow.com/#Draw)

------
VaucGiaps
Useful! Option to use the 'real' ASCII box-drawing characters and shadows
would be a good add!

~~~
ygra
What are the "real" ASCII box drawing characters? -| and +? It already uses
them.

------
peterkelly
This needs to be a google doodle.

------
suprjami
I use this all the time for quick network diagrams when explaining things via
email.

------
_JamesA_
This is awesome. Any suggestions for a slick ascii table formatter?

~~~
konradb
Emacs org-mode can do tables - not web based though so may not be what you are
looking for.

------
lewish
It's back up now.

------
ca98am79
great for mocking up nethack levels!

------
OGC
Yeah, i remember when i did something similar in Visual Basic when i was 14..

