kroki VS dagre

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

It was unmaintained for a long time (maybe considered done implementing the algorithm it set out to), but recently a Google engineer has revived it: https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre

The issue I have with a lot of these tools is they work fine when depicting relationships between tables in the same schema (talking mainly about PostgreSQL databases), but few support showing relationships between tables across different schemas.

Also, when the number of tables grows large, few have layouts arranged in an optimal way. I use D2 (https://d2lang.com/) to create ERDs. However, of the free layout engines available in D2, Dagre (https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre) and ELK (https://github.com/eclipse/elk) both don't have optimal placement of layouts for a sufficiently complicated database.

You are right, after a bit of searching found nice library: https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre and couple of others. Maybe will try it out.

I am using ReactFlow with Dagre to create reasonably simple graph flows as the following example:

Hello,

I've been researching layered graph algorithms, but it appears that this market is mostly inactive at the moment.

Dagre (https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre) is considered outdated, with a codebase from 2015 that is no longer being updated, although they still accept some pull requests.

KLAY (https://github.com/kieler/klayjs) has been succeeded by ELK, and development stopped in 2016.

ELK (https://github.com/kieler/elkjs) is currently being developed by the KIELER Project, mostly by students and professors, written in Java. They are doing a great job, but the library is written in Java and then transpiled to JavaScript. They also rely on students for help with the development, which makes progress slow.

Do you happen to know of any new projects that are actively addressing this problem?

dagrejs has a section on "Recommended Reading" which lists which algorithms from which papers they implement.

https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre/wiki#recommended-reading

Terrastruct engineer here. The visualization will be open source though I can't say for sure yet whether it'll be with our layout algorithm or with https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre.

Another option is Dagre which is apparently now abandoned.