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I recently had to draw some diagrams for documenting something. After looking at various Markdown-friendly options I landed on svgbob[1]. I believe it's a superior solution to these kinds of graph drawing tools for Markdown for one specific reason: the code is still readable. When I go to look at a Markdown file I don't always open the output. I will commonly open up a README file in Vim or just cat it to the terminal. In this case diagrams like those in this post is next to useless. I'm not going to read through some complex drawing definitions and try to visualise the results. With svgbob (or Typograms[2] or any of the other similar options) you can still read the Markdown text document and see the diagrams which is great!
Of course this comes with a tradeoff, drawing the diagrams can be a bit of a pain. But I believe this can be solved by a good Markdown editor or editor plugin. Alternatively a spec like this could be converted into an svgbob-compatible diagram.
[1]https://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor/
While not embedded in markdown, I like d2 [1]. I can use it with org-babel to embed and view the diagrams on emacs. After using graphviz for years, the visual output seems more polished to me. With that said, I want to give pikchr a try.
[1]:https://d2lang.com/
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