d2-docs VS d2-playground

You're right, d2-docs will be changed to render all diagrams with Dagre or ELK instead.

The docs existed before D2 was open source and we had open source layout options. Sorry about that.

https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs/issues/43

> By the way I've just realised why your github repo does not provide the sources of the diagrams in docs - it would blow your game wide open, once users start asking why they aren't getting the results depicted. And almost no compileable examples, either

Not sure what you mean no compilable examples. Full source of the docs is at https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-docs including all the examples. The first example in the Github repo also had a line "Rendered with the TALA layout engine" so the source was upfront.

> Will you please stop lying? I am not "mad" because something isn't free, but because you're misrepresenting the nature of your D2 language. It is not something that you're making available to benefit community, but a thinly disguised marketing ploy.

We're running a company, we're absolutely interested in making money.

But open sourcing D2 doesn't just help us with user acquisition, it certainly also helps the community in adding another open source alternative in the text to diagram market. And it's good quality code. If we go under, someone else can pickup the torch and fork D2.

And it's incorrect to say that the free engines are not as good. They absolutely are suitable alternatives and do beat TALA in many instances. It's not in our interest to hide the best parts of D2, or else no one would use it. I'd even go as far to say TALA will never be as good as them in many instances, especially when the structure is hierarchical. But that's ok, they all use different algorithms and that's what makes them good in different instances. TALA is specifically for software diagrams, in instances such as if you have many nested containers.

If you can quote a specific piece of text on our GitHub or website, we will change it to make it more clear that D2 is fully open source and TALA is just an optional optimization.

https://play.d2lang.com/?script=qlDQtVOo5AIEAAD__w%3D%3D&ske...

I was going to ask why you don't have a web version but you already do. I'm going to play with this more today.

Have you thought about an "auto compile"/live mode where it changes as you edit the text? I think this adds a level of intuitiveness that would help new users explore.

Wow that's a very detailed catch, thanks for reporting! Made an issue: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-playground/issues/33

A video can be a lot of work, it is quite challenging to produce a satisfying result. Instead, I suggest you to draw (here is a nice online tool to do that. If you prefer plain text, you can use d2) a Flowchart to represent your workflow. For someone who wants to understand a use case, it will be much quicker to look at a diagram rather than read or watch a video. And it will be easier for you to produce it.

We'll have our own API available for you to do this too. So you can make something on playground (https://play.d2lang.com) and then render the same way. E.g. https://github.com/alixander/test-render/blob/main/README.md

if you're talking about the playground, I did the initial version in a weekend or so (https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-playground), which includes building a WASM version of D2 (written in Go), putting a text editor, some UI stuff like dropdowns/menu, hooking it up together, layouts and responsiveness whatnot.

If you're talking about D2 language itself, ~2 devs over 3/4 of a year.

You can give it a spin to see if it's a fit for you here: https://play.d2lang.com