BadAscii

What is badascii? It's a diagram that is drawn with simple ASCII characters that can be used to represent simple block diagrams. For example:

       +-------------+        +-------------+
       | Thing 1     |        | Thing 2     |
       |             |        |             |
  +--->|ins      outs+------->|ins      outs+----+
  |    |             |        |             |    |
  |    |             |        |             |    |
  |    +-------------+        +-------------+    |
  |                                              |
  +----------------------------------------------+

and convert them into SVG images like this:

A set of Rust Crates that implement the BadAscii system for capturing block diagrams in comments and plain text files and then rendering them into SVGs. This repository contains the following crates:

• badascii - contains the pure rendering logic. This crate takes a string representation of the block diagram, and generates the drawing commands needed to render it. It also provides an SVG backend that can be used to generate an SVG diagram as a string.
• badascii-cli - a simple CLI that wraps the library and provides a way to easily generate diagrams on the command line. You can customize the generated output using command line options.
• badascii-doc - a couple of proc-macros that allow you to put badascii diagrams into comments in your Rust code, and then have the rendered diagrams included in the output of your rustdoc.
• badascii-gui - a GUI application to makes editing badascii diagrams simple and fun. Written in egui. You can run this locally on your machine, or you can use the web version.
• badascii-mdbook - a preprocessor plugin for mdbook that allows you to include badascii diagrams in your mdbook, and then render them to SVG.

The intent of BadAscii is not to replace other, more sophisticated tools out there. It's to provide a way to build block diagrams that are:

• Legible in a code editor
• Editable with no special tools
• Meant to show basic blocks and their relationships
• Flexible enough to do all the things, but not complicated.

TODO

• Fix background on SVGs
• Add help link?