erd VS kroki

I like it and the comparison site on https://text-to-diagram.com

I just wanted to drop a reference to Burnt Sushi's ERD tool [0]. It only does one diagram type: Entity Relationship Diagram. It's wonderful. Human-first syntax, code comments, and some simple formatting settings like colors and font sizes that help make more complex diagram pleasing and informative.

[0] https://github.com/BurntSushi/erd

Only tool I've come across is erd but have not personally used it. We use LucidChart for our ERDs at work. They have an API to export to PNG and to create documents within it. The documentation for the API is dense, but it is something I am hoping to take a hack day or two to try to understand and see if I can automate generating and updating our own ERDs.

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