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Show HN: ShakyDraw – Hand-drawn block diagrams from plain text
- mr_ali3n 9y agoDamn useful and easy to create flow diagrams.
- problems 9y agoYou might also check out Plant UML - they have a much simpler language to type. http://plantuml.com/activity-diagram-legacy http://plantuml.com/activity-diagram-legacy
- Gaelan 9y agoChracters all appear as tofu on iOS safari.
- saagarjha 9y agoThat's because your browser is too narrow to display the text, so it's wrapping.
- johnnyg 9y agoI wish there was a feature to double click a phrase and auto draw the ASCII box around it.
- averagewall 9y agoIf it had that, somebody would wish you could draw arrows, move and resize boxes by dragging, etc. Then you've got a full blown ASCII drawing program. They already exist as a few people have mentioned in this thread. So you can use them for what they're good at and copy/paste their output into ShakeyDraw.
- sigvef 9y agoIn a perfect world, everything is generated from ASCII diagram sources: https://github.com/sigvef/sigvehtml https://github.com/sigvef/sigvehtml .
- milen 9y agoIf 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 https://monodraw.helftone.com
- fwr 9y agoThis is really great! Is there a way to paste/import a previously exported graph and preserve edit capabilities?
- milen 9y agoThat's a very good question that comes up quite often. Unfortunately, that's not currently supported :( In fact, it's technically impossible to recover all the information that was originally present in the Monodraw document because the conversion to text is inherently lossy. Now, you can probably try to use some heuristics to recover as much information as possible (e.g., detect boxes, arrows). That would certainly work in many simple cases where there's no overlapping shapes. Having said that, I've got other, higher priority updates planned in the pipeline before I can even consider whether to tackle this problem.
- pranavsinghca 9y agoyou could maybe embed the original ascii, or a meta representation of it in the generated image?
- afarrell 9y agoShould I use moondraw with a wacom tablet, or just the trackpad?
- perryprog 9y agoI would say trackpad, it's less drawing - more diagrams.
- dan-compton 9y agoGreat! The easy problem is solved. Now let's do the reverse so that I can hand-draw ditaa diagrams.
- r00fus 9y agoThat's exactly what I was going to say - the "hand drawn" diagram on the right is better looking, but the left hand is far more accessible and arguably have more utility. That said, this is a really cool demo.
- huangc10 9y agoI was just thinking that. It should go both ways :D
- ocrcustomserver 9y agoMyScript offers an API that does this. You need to feed it all the motions/sequence of points that make up the shape (known as "online OCR"), it won't work with a static document. Demo: https://webdemo.myscript.com/views/shape.html https://webdemo.myscript.com/views/shape.html
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- sankha93 9y agoThere are tools available to draw ASCII diagrams easily, like asciiflow.com or asciidraw.com. Their output can be directly pasted into ShakyDraw.
- adictator 9y agohttp://www.asciidraw.com/#Draw http://www.asciidraw.com/#Draw ^This is what I use to generate the boxes and other useful shapes & then put that into shakydraw.
- webwanderings 9y agoHow are you copy/pasting? Edit: never mind. Got it. Brilliant.
- jmcphers 9y agoIf 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 https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbobrus [1] https://github.com/ivanceras/spongedown https://github.com/ivanceras/spongedown
- storrgie 9y agoAnd 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.
- eddyg 9y agoYou may be interested in this recent HN discussion on converting ASCII drawings to SVG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14422777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14422777
- ariabuckles 9y agoThis looks like it uses a very similar algorithm to https://github.com/dbushong/shaky https://github.com/dbushong/shaky , which is a port of @mraleph's 2012 talk (@mraleph is cited in this site's about page)
- zzzeek 9y agoI 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).
- teleclimber 9y agoI use the DrawExpress app for exactly that. It's brilliant. http://www.drawexpress.com/ http://www.drawexpress.com/
- jonahx 9y agoFantastic idea. I'd love a web-based version I could use on the laptop.
- thirdsun 9y agoThis looks great. I can't say the same about their website which feels like a mess and really doesn't sell what otherwise seems like a very useful app.
- msravi 9y agoJust bought this now, after watching the video and trying out the "lite" version on Android. It really is brilliant.
- ozzmotik 9y agowow that was actually really cool just watching the demo; if I weren't currently in debt to the app store I'd totally try it
- Mandatum 9y agoCame here wanting this, found it in the comments. OP, it's cool and all - but I'm never going to manually type out box diagrams. I don't write e-zines or NFO's for warez releases.
- kav2k 9y agoCan combo it with http://asciiflow.com/ http://asciiflow.com/
- King-Aaron 9y agoWell executed solution to a problem I don't understand as one that needs solving?
- Animats 9y agoAw. 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/picfix.py https://github.com/John-Nagle/pasv/blob/master/src/Util/picf...
- grigy 9y agoVery useful and would be more useful in form of an API that could be used with Markdown text.
- diimdeep 9y agoWe need ShakyDraw + Asciiflow to be 1 instrument
- sequence7 9y agoIn 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)
- sankha93 9y agoOops! Will take a look into it and fix this right away.
- mclightning 9y agohmm. isnt this like more difficult than actually drawing it?
- OJFord 9y agoI thought that at first - but what if you want a digital copy; what's the plainest, whitest thing you can find to draw on, and do you have a scanner? Obviously a lot of the time if you're going to the deliberate trouble of creating a digital image, you'd probably prefer it didn't look hand drawn... but I can imagine seeing it in repo readmes; that sort of thing. Actually that's quite appealing - because you could source control the ASCII too.
- lozzo 9y agothis page has to be bookmarked. well done
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