cocalc VS kroki

I have some unit tests for billing and subscription code for my company that started breaking in CI today due to the leap day: https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/commit/8575029c2b76787...

1. I'm integrating ChatGPT extensively into https://CoCalc.com. This integration makes a lot of sense, because cocalc is a platform in which relatively inexperienced students use Jupyter notebooks, linux terminals and Latex. So far, the most popular feature by far is a "Help me fix this" button that appears above stacktraces in Jupyter notebooks.

2. One software engineering challenges is that ChatGPT often outputs code in markdown blocks. I've had to emphasize in prompts that it should explicitly mark the language. I then got inspired to make it possible to evaluate in place the code that appears in these blocks using a Jupyter kernel, and spent a week making that work (so, e.g., if you type a question into the chatgpt box on the landing page at https://cocalc.com, and code appears in the output, often you can just evaluate it right there). There seem to be endless surprises and challenges though. For example, a few minutes ago I realized that sometimes the giant tracebacks one gets when using Python in Jupyter notebooks are so big (even doing simple things with matplotlib) that they end up resulting in too much truncation: https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/issues/6634

3. I'm mostly using GPT-3.5-turbo rather than GPT4, even though I have a GPT4 api key. Aside from costs, GPT4 takes about 4x as long, which often just feels too long for my use case. The average time for a complete response from GPT-3.5 for my application is about 8 seconds, versus over 30s for GPT4.

Github's implementation is really lazy. There are many much better approaches to precisely this problem. E.g., Jupyter notebooks implement one that has matured in the wild over a decade. There's this very flexible markdown-it plugin that implements anther https://github.com/goessner/markdown-it-texmath, and my version of it here https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/blob/master/src/packag... which I rewrote in typescript with a focus on the same semantics as Jupyter has, but for CoCalc, and I've been working on using unifiedjs to provide more general latex for Markdown (not just formulas) here https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/pull/5982 Parsing math is much easier if you use a plugin to an existing markdown parser, rather than trying to do some hack outside of that (which is what Github probably does, and also what Jupyter does).

Your wish showing up in the face of a submission just 14 days ago and then another 29 days ago must be indicative of why there are so many dupes all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=kroki.io

You can feel free to submit the GH repo, as that one doesn't seem to have been submitted before https://github.com/yuzutech/kroki

Pikchr https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow is the other general purpose one and older than d2. It is "Source-Code License: 0-clause BSD" as it says on the page.

Someone made it into wasm and put playground for pikchr here https://www.jakethaw.com/pikchr_webassembly_demo/

Can also try pikchr online here on https://kroki.io/#try which is hosting many other text to diagram tools as well.

I use mermaid.js heavily, but plug for Kroki:

https://kroki.io/

“Kroki provides a unified API with support for BlockDiag (BlockDiag, SeqDiag, ActDiag, NwDiag, PacketDiag, RackDiag), BPMN, Bytefield, C4 (with PlantUML), D2, DBML, Ditaa, Erd, Excalidraw, GraphViz, Mermaid, Nomnoml, Pikchr, PlantUML, Structurizr, SvgBob, Symbolator, TikZ, UMLet, Vega, Vega-Lite, WaveDrom, WireViz... and more to come!”

If you don't mind my asking, what aspects of "acceptable layout" is usually the first to get busted?

I'm extremely excited about using WireViz[1] to automate wiring harness diagram creation, and if I can, I'd like to know the speedbumps before I hit them. I'm thinkin generous linking between diagrams will be one path.

[1] Project:: https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz SandboxP:: https://kroki.io/#try [select Diagram>WireViz]

The SVG output is embedded into the PDF file.

https://kroki.io/examples.html#mind-map

Kroki has other text-based formats for flow charts, Gantt charts, UML diagrams, packet diagrams, network diagrams, word clouds, etc.

My cross-platform desktop text editor, KeenWrite, allows users to define variables in an external YAML file. The editor calls out to Kroki[1] to convert text-based diagrams to SVG. The diagrams can reference variables and are rendered using EchoSVG[2].

KeenWrite[3] can produce PDF documentation from Markdown documents that has PlantUML diagrams with elements stored in an external, machine-readable file. Here are screenshots showing variables on the left, diagram text in the middle, and a real-time render on the right:

* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

KeenWrite supports all diagrams offered by Kroki, which includes "diagram-plantuml".

[1]: https://kroki.io/

[2]: https://github.com/css4j/echosvg/

[3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite