Text to Diagram Tools

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

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/

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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)

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

Missing TikZ and pgfplots.

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

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

Any of 'em do state machines?