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Text to Diagram Tools

by laithshadeed on 12/1/22, 4:28 PM with 26 comments

• by gnabgib on 12/1/22, 5:53 PM

  This was brought up several times in the D2 thread 9 days ago (626pts, 153 comments)[0], since D2 built this to help showcase their feature set. Lots of the discussion there applies.

  [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704254

• by swyx on 12/1/22, 5:40 PM

  i collect these tools for fun! https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#cod...

  - https://gojs.net/latest/samples/decisionTree.html interactive diagrams

  - http://blockdiag.com/en/

  - python's diagrams https://pypi.org/project/diagrams/

  - https://structurizr.com/

  - https://github.com/mhlabs/cfn-diagram visualize cloudformation -> draw.io

  - https://wavedrom.com/ (OSS) - Digital Timing Diagram or Waveform from simple textual description.

  - way more tools here: https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram/

• by MilStdJunkie on 12/1/22, 5:35 PM

  I've been playing with Vega bit lately, because of the support for geo graphs and violin/box/"R Stuff" graphs.

  Vega is theoretically available in Asciidoctor-diagram, but not everything is supported yet :(

  Project

  https://vega.github.io/vega/

  Sandbox

  https://vega.github.io/editor/#/custom/vega

  Geo example

  https://vega.github.io/editor/#/examples/vega/airport-connec...

  Box plot example

  https://vega.github.io/editor/#/examples/vega/box-plot

• by tonerow on 12/1/22, 5:50 PM

  https://flowchart.fun is one option – it has a really straight-forward syntax

• by alixanderwang on 12/1/22, 6:52 PM

  hi, I'm Alex at Terrastruct and we made this. we just launched D2 last week, where this site was brought up plenty, so I didn't expect this to come up again. happy to answer q's if any.

  (we're working on a playground so that this site's examples can be runnable!)

  i'll also use this opportunity to plug that this next release of D2 is going to be packed with features/improvements/fixes that came from feedback received on HN from the launch:

  https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/blob/master/ci/release/cha... https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/pull/259

• by news_hacker on 12/1/22, 6:50 PM

  I would love an AI-enabled chat bot that transforms text -> diagrams. Diagram creation could still be a lot easier.

  For example: "I want to show that the causes of burnout are the following 5 categories: 1) lack of purpose, 2) community breakdown, 3) ... " -> and then that gets turned into a diagram. Then an update like: "make lack of purpose more prominent" and it increases in size.

  I would even settle for a transformer that converts natural language to one of the diagram syntax languages in the OP link.

• by zdw on 12/1/22, 7:01 PM

  If you want to integrate both text and freeform diagramming, the diagrams.net tool will support embedding Mermaid:

  https://www.diagrams.net/blog/mermaid-diagrams

  They're not editable afterward, but it sometimes comes in handy if you want to render them out as an image for a document/presentation.

• by laithshadeed on 12/1/22, 4:28 PM

  Source: https://github.com/terrastruct/text-to-diagram-site

• by roflyear on 12/1/22, 6:39 PM

  Anyone know of a good tool that will generate some annotations in Python code (maybe docstrings??) to similar diagrams?

  Googling brings up a few but nothing that looks super promising.

• by karmakaze on 12/1/22, 5:02 PM

  Another ERD diagram site I've used is https://dbdiagram.io/

• by omarhaneef on 12/1/22, 7:27 PM

  If only something like this were part of markdown.

  (And here on HN, I hope someone is going to say: yes, this vscode extension will add it to markdown)

• by topspin on 12/1/22, 6:37 PM

  Was just looking at BPMN.io tools: a BPMN and DMN diagram rendering engine. Really nice work. Badgeware license though.

• by delta_p_delta_x on 12/2/22, 2:04 AM

  Missing TikZ and pgfplots.

  With GitHub Copilot, TikZ just became a lot more discoverable and somewhat nicer to use.

• by alexitosrv on 12/1/22, 6:26 PM

  Guys, for computer network representation, graphs mostly, do you have a preference?

• by lowbloodsugar on 12/1/22, 7:20 PM

  Any of 'em do state machines?