The LaTeX ditaa package

With this, you will not need to bring your diagrams outside your .tex file and not to worry about wiring such files for diagrams, and tools (Microsoft Visio, PowerPoint, Libre Office tools, as such) from which they are created.

\begin{ditaa}{ditaa caption example}{ditaaexample}
    +-----+     +----+     +---+
    |Store+---->|This+---->|One|
    +--+--+     +----+     +---+
       |
       V
    +-----+
    |THIS |
    +--+--+
       |
       V
    +-----------+     +--+
    |another one+---->|Hi|
    +-----------+     +--+
\end{ditaa}

The source above will be converted into a following diagram and incorporated in your final PDF.

Figure 1: Figure Rendered Ascii Art

Prerequisites

• You need to have ditaa installed. (Need to be able to run ditaa from your command line). Fortunately, recent package managers such as apt allow you to install it with a single command line sudo apt install ditaa. brew let me do similar sudo brew isntall ditaa on my mac. For windows, sorry, please let me know how to do that…​

• You need to give an option --shell-escape to your LaTeX compiler (such as pdflatex, latex, etc) command whichever you use.

How to use

• Place the ditaa.sty file at the same directory as your .tex file. (This step will not be necessary, if latex-ditaa is available from CTAN)

• Create ditaa directory under the directory you have for the other non-ditaa images. This package will create .ditaa and .png files here.

• Do usepackage[imagepath=IMAGEPATH]{ditaa} beffore \begin{document}. The IMAGEPATH is the directory you have images.

• Compile your .tex files as usual, but giving --shell-escape option to your (pdf)latex command.

Typically, run mkdir ./resources/graphics and do following in your .tex file.

\def\imagepath{./resources/graphics}
\usepackage[imagepath=\imagepath]{ditaa}
\graphicspath{ {\imagepath/} }

Then compile your file with pdflatex --shell-escape.

Options

• Use https://github.com/stathissideris/ditaa that support SVG

Its supported options are as follow (summed up) :

% Turns anti-aliasing off
-A,--no-antialias

% The background colour of the image
-b,--background <BACKGROUND>

% Renders the debug grid
-d,--debug

% Prevents the separation of common edges
-E,--no-separation

% The encoding of the input file
-e,--encoding <ENCODING>

% The input is an HTML file
-h,--html

% Prints usage help
--help

% Image file is overwriten
-o,--overwrite

% All corners to be rendered as round corners
-r,--round-corners

% Turns off the drop-shadow effect
-S,--no-shadows

% Size of the rendered image
-s,--scale <SCALE>

% SVG image as destination file
--svg

% SVG font URL
--svg-font-url <FONT>

% Diagram rendered on a transparent background
-T,--transparent

% Tabs interpreted as x spaces
-t,--tabs <TABS>

% Makes ditaa more verbose
-v,--verbose

% Sides of parallelograms as fixed slope
-W,--fixed-slope

Cannot be specified on a group basis, only in the preamble.
Just add the requested parameters without the leading/separator dash(es).

\usepackage[S]{ditaa}

or :

\usepackage[noshadows, svgfonturl={carlito-regular-webfont.svg}]{ditaa}

Tips

Online sites such as ascii-flow will be your friends!

Future Works

• I want to use this in OverLeaf. Publish in CTAN? Help me. I’m a LaTeX newbie.

References

• latex-beamerposter: I learned a lot from this; such as how to package my .sty, how to organize directories under my repo for LaTeX style package, etc.