tikzit VS kroki

Take a look at TikZiT, which is a FOSS GUI for creating tikz files and also turning them into image files. I found it really useful for learning TikZ. Note that you don't need TikZiT to generate images, it's just an example of how it's done.

The best way to TikZ is to copy-paste from previous figures you've created.

The second best is to look for a similar figure on TeXample https://texample.net/tikz/examples/ or stack overflow https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tikz-pgf

The third best option is to use squared paper to draw by hand, then transfer hand-drawn stuff into TikZ code. It's slow as hell, but works well if you build up a collection of components you can copy-paste into other figs later.

There are also some GUI tools you could try: https://www.mathcha.io/ https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/cheunen/freetikz/freetikz.htm... https://tikzit.github.io/ etc. (more links in this thread https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/84890/does-there-exi... )

Its much much faster than writing the code, and the output is very clean. You can follow the instructions from the link. takes less than 30 min to set up and less than an hour to get comfortable with it. Its well worth the effort. I have used a configuration similar to the author's config from this page. And my work has been way faster this way.

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