from Hacker News

Show HN: ShakyDraw – Hand-drawn block diagrams from plain text

by sankha93 on 6/21/17, 6:25 PM with 50 comments

• by milen on 6/21/17, 8:56 PM

  If you're on macOS, definitely check out Monodraw [1] as a quick and easy way to create such diagrams (then copy + paste into ShakyDraw). Just remember to set your document alphabet to ASCII and you're good to go (from the inspector).

  Full disclosure: I'm the developer of Monodraw. If you have any questions, happy to answer here.

  [1] https://monodraw.helftone.com

• by zzzeek on 6/21/17, 10:29 PM

  I want the opposite. Draw a block diagram on paper, scan it, and get a super swank omnigraffle-style diagram from it (or a top-notch ASCII art diagram).

• by dan-compton on 6/21/17, 8:59 PM

  Great! The easy problem is solved. Now let's do the reverse so that I can hand-draw ditaa diagrams.

• by sigvef on 6/21/17, 11:44 PM

  In a perfect world, everything is generated from ASCII diagram sources: https://github.com/sigvef/sigvehtml .

• by jmcphers on 6/21/17, 9:44 PM

  If you like this, try SvgBobRus[0], which also converts plain-text diagrams into graphics (and has a larger vocabulary). There's also Spongedown[1], which makes it possible to embed these diagrams in your Markdown files and render the whole thing to HTML + SVG.

  [0] https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbobrus [1] https://github.com/ivanceras/spongedown

• by King-Aaron on 6/22/17, 1:49 AM

  Well executed solution to a problem I don't understand as one that needs solving?

• by storrgie on 6/21/17, 10:13 PM

  And where is stated mraleph codebase to go from ascii to an image? I'd like a command line tool to convert locally, or this open sourced so I can host a local version.

• by Animats on 6/22/17, 3:36 AM

  Aw. I wrote something last year to translate old documents with plain text boxes and arrows to Unicode line drawing characters. This was a small part of another project. It's here:

  https://github.com/John-Nagle/pasv/blob/master/src/Util/picf...

• by Gaelan on 6/21/17, 8:49 PM

  Chracters all appear as tofu on iOS safari.

• by sequence7 on 6/22/17, 7:08 AM

  In Edge I'm getting the following error which means no diagram gets rendered:

      SCRIPT5007: Unable to get property 'ready' of undefined or null reference
      bundle.min.js (1,5413)

• by diimdeep on 6/22/17, 5:36 AM

  We need ShakyDraw + Asciiflow to be 1 instrument

• by mr_ali3n on 6/21/17, 7:35 PM

  Damn useful and easy to create flow diagrams.

• by grigy on 6/22/17, 5:19 AM

  Very useful and would be more useful in form of an API that could be used with Markdown text.

• by johnnyg on 6/21/17, 8:50 PM

  I wish there was a feature to double click a phrase and auto draw the ASCII box around it.

• by mclightning on 6/22/17, 8:44 AM

  hmm. isnt this like more difficult than actually drawing it?

• by lozzo on 6/23/17, 4:16 PM

  this page has to be bookmarked. well done

• by adictator on 6/21/17, 9:30 PM

  http://www.asciidraw.com/#Draw

  ^This is what I use to generate the boxes and other useful shapes & then put that into shakydraw.