Diagrammer

ASCII diagrams to pictures converter.

It is designed to be a part of an automated workflow, such as documentation or site generation, as a tool that converts diagrams drawn in ASCII art technick into bitmaps.

For example, a diagram:

 Source code/Text

        |
        v
+---------------+        +------------+
| Documentation | . . . >|            |
|               |        | Diagrammer |
|   Generator   |< . . . |            |
+-------+-------+        +------------+
        |
        v

  Documentation

will be converted into:

Usage

The only mandatory command line argument passed to the program is a file to be converted:

diagrammer <input-file>

Output

By default the output is saved in a file output.png under the current working directory. The name of the output file can be changed by passing a desired one after the --output option:

diagrammer --output diagram.png diagram.txt

Warning. If the output file exists, it will be rewritten without a notice.

Debug Mode

There is a 'debug' mode. In this mode the diagram is drawn on top of a grid. The grid's cells represent characters, therefore cells dimensions equal to maximum possible characters width and height. The mode is enabled by --debug command line option.

Philosophy

Often diagrams are parts of a source code or some documentation that must be easily comprehended in its original text representation. For this reason, ASCII diagrams must not be polluted by special commands for tools, they are processed by.

Related Projects

There are several projects with similar functionality:

• ASCIIToSVG (PHP).
• Asciidiagram (Haskell).
• ditaa (Java).
• Markdeep (JavaScript).
• Shaape (Python).
• Shaky (CoffeeScript).

Many of them as well as this one were inspired by 'ditaa'. Thanks to Stathis Sideris for such a great idea!