Web tool that generates flowcharts from text

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Originally published at: Web tool that generates flowcharts from text | Boing Boing

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Where was this when I was in College? Oh, no desk computers back in the ice ages…

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Is that you Pythagoras?

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Oh, now I feel really old…

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There is a plaintext language for generating graphs called Graphviz (technically Graphviz is the software that produces the graphs; the language for describing the graphs is called “DOT”). It’s more complicated than this (it can also do more stuff), but at it’s simplest, not by much. There’s a web-based renderer here.

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The mathematicians have taken this idea, and extended it to suit their purposes.

http://yifanhu.net/GALLERY/GRAPHS/index1.html

Graphviz visualizations of “sparse matrices”-- tens of thousands of rows, tens of thousands of columns.

540×540 168 KB

http://yifanhu.net/GALLERY/GRAPHS/GIF_SMALL/Meszaros@mod2.html

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Couple caveats:

  1. It doesn’t preserve the order of indented stuff you entered

  2. Don’t use – (double dash) in your text or it’ll generate invalid SVG

  3. Once I exported SVG I can’t export it again. Not even refresh will reset it. Weird?

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I bet you had a sly drool.

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PlantUML.com can do this and a lot more, often use it to sketch out what I’m planning when programming. (It’s easier to read the docs if you download the pdf, as the individual doc pages have lots of adverts)

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