Comments on: ASCII diagrams to image

By: wwwlab

wwwlab — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 22:36:25 +0000

This is very cool, I’ve already had a play about with it and I’m hoping for a PHP port very soon. I’d like to use it to make a website to display my family tree.

By: paul

paul — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:09:32 +0000

You could draw these diagams with: http://www.asciidrawer.com

By: macosbrain

macosbrain — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 19:22:17 +0000

wow very nice. but the drawing of ascii diagrams takes me much longer than the drawing of an simple image. so i think image to ascii would be better.

By: Eugene Panin

Eugene Panin — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 13:34:51 +0000

What is the goal of this ascii->graphics conversion? Just for fun?

By: kyberfabrikken

kyberfabrikken — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:12:56 +0000

Isn't graphviz a better way to go? dot-markup is really simple, and rather than describe how to render the graph, it describes what the graph should contain (and leaves it to the layout engine to arrange it).

By: mutant

mutant — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 02:05:59 +0000

This is kinda cool, but only in a golly gee sort of fashion. I don’t see very many practical uses for this.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 22:51:42 +0000

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By: HarryF

HarryF — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 22:11:58 +0000

-offtopic-
So, when will Sitepoint invest some time into a Python section here on the Sitepoint blogs? It seems we have the talent, experience, and willingness for it. Great addition to keep it still within the PHP topic area though with that last sentence, Harry. ^_^
-offtopic-

When posting it needs a “Python” checkbox. And having a real Python blogger would help ;) I guess anyone motived to blog on Python should try here: http://www.sitepoint.com/contact

but what happens if/when a not-so-perfectly-rendered diagram is sent to this? Does it support error handling methods and exceptions/extendability?

It seems robust in the sense that I haven’t been able to break it - you still get “something” out of the far end but, for example with dotted lines, they are not interpreted as a line - just a series of dots.

How painful is it to actually draw with ASCII tho? If you need a tool to draw it, why not go and use SVG?

Doing large ASCII diagrams from hand is a pain in terms of filling in / aligning stuff with whitespace. But it is quite popular - emacs has a tool for this, for example. If doing this I tend to start with JavE then fine tune by hand.

The advantage is you can have the image source truly inline with the document (just “plain” text, no browser plugins for non-Firefox users needed). Also Open Source SVG tools aren’t so well evolved - there’s inkscape - http://inkscape.org/ - otherwise I guess dia (http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/) can export SVG. And tools like visitors (http://www.hping.org/visitors/) produce ASCII reports which could be turned into bar chart images with this.

By: Ren

Ren — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 21:28:51 +0000

Reminds me of the old IBM DOS charset, it had all the funky box drawing characters in it.

How painful is it to actually draw with ASCII tho? If you need a tool to draw it, why not go and use SVG?