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Great! I am a fan of seeing diagrams being generated instead of manually drawn. I was a bit disappointed however to find out the project uses Graphviz/DOT unde
by 39Wc 6y ago
Great! I am a fan of seeing diagrams being generated instead of manually drawn.
I was a bit disappointed however to find out the project uses Graphviz/DOT under the hood.
What would be the reason not to try a newer rendering engine such as as the Eclipse Layout Kernel (ELK)?
- dastx 6y agoCurious, what's wrong with graphviz?
- afandian 6y agoI've used it for auto generated diagrams of our code. Partly because it's what I know, partly because, surprisingly, there isn't anything free similar. It's crashy for moderate sized graphs. And doesn't have quite enough layout and styling features. It's good enough but I'm on the lookout for something better.
- watt 6y agoHave you engaged the graphviz team? Maybe the don't have graphs of that size as part of their test suite, and if you could donate some samples, they would fix the "crashy" behaviour. No software should ever be "crashy" - it's buggy and bugs need to be corrected.
- afandian 6y agoI've come across the same issues that others have reported. The answers have more or less been "contributions welcome". They have every right to say that!
- mbar84 6y agoI was thinking about writing a markdown extension that would render a code block into an image using this and this extra system dependency is also what turned me off. It's just an extra roadblock for users and whole block of extra instructions for each platform that users have to figure out. It would be better if it would just work out of the box.
- yardshop 6y agoYour extension idea sounds similar to this that was posted yesterday: Pikchr: Documentation https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/homepage.md https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/homepage.md Pikchr – PIC-like markup language for diagrams in technical documentation | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24601971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24601971 I don't know if you're referring to Go or GraphViz as the extra dependency (or both). It looks like Pikchr doesn't have any external dependencies, it's just a C library.
- quicklime 6y agoHey that’s cool, I didn’t know about this. But there are a few things that would make this difficult to use: 1. How do you even call a Java library from Go? 2. Graphviz generates diagrams, whereas according to the ELK page: > Note that ELK itself doesn't render the drawing but only computes positions (and possibly dimensions) for the diagram elements. It also wasn’t really clear to me from glancing at the page, what this does better than graphviz.
- 39Wc 6y agoThanks for taking the time to reply to my comment and sorry for the short reply from my side - I am in a hurry. In case you were looking for a similar text-based integration of a layout engine with your tool there is a textual DSL for ELK called ELKT: http://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/elklive/ http://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/elklive/ One could certainly feed that into a binary running the kernel similarly to how a DOT file is fed into graphviz.
- 39Wc 6y agoAlso worth mentioning, the Sprotty project by Mirko. https://github.com/eclipse/sprotty https://github.com/eclipse/sprotty This integrates with XText, ELK and the VS Code LSP and allows you to generate diagrams for your own DSL!