aasvg VS svgbobrus

> I think so-called ASCII-art is more in the spirit of Markdown.

If you're simply doing a less on a file, then sure. But if you want to do a 'render' on the Markdown and convert it to another format (HTML, PDF) then having a mechanism that can translate ASCII to something graphical could be useful.

In some ways this is what the DOT language does in Graphviz:

* https://graphviz.org/gallery/

> The spirit behind the kind of thing in the OP, on the other hand, is that one should get nicely formatted HTML from Markdown for the purpose of online consumption. Which is a very different goal.

I'm not sure if there's a way to have both ASCII art and it be renderable to graphics. Closest that I could find:

* https://github.com/martinthomson/aasvg

I recently had to draw some diagrams for documenting something. After looking at various Markdown-friendly options I landed on svgbob[1]. I believe it's a superior solution to these kinds of graph drawing tools for Markdown for one specific reason: the code is still readable. When I go to look at a Markdown file I don't always open the output. I will commonly open up a README file in Vim or just cat it to the terminal. In this case diagrams like those in this post is next to useless. I'm not going to read through some complex drawing definitions and try to visualise the results. With svgbob (or Typograms[2] or any of the other similar options) you can still read the Markdown text document and see the diagrams which is great!

Of course this comes with a tradeoff, drawing the diagrams can be a bit of a pain. But I believe this can be solved by a good Markdown editor or editor plugin. Alternatively a spec like this could be converted into an svgbob-compatible diagram.

[1]https://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor/

Online playground svgbob-editor is also updated to use the latest version of svgbob. It is however a painfully slow to edit the diagrams from there, so it's better if you draw the diagram somwhere else and paste it to there.

There’s Svgbob. Plus when it comes to more complex diagrams or graphs where creating the ASCII art by hand in can be quite finicky, there’s a number of tools (including drawing tools) to make creating ASCII art much easier.

https://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor/

svgbob

Since the post contains ASCII art, let me recommend you svgbob :)

The app can now render Svgbob code blocks (https://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor).