Text -> Diagram Tool

uml diagramming
Jon picture Jon · Apr 22, 2010 · Viewed 17.4k times · Source

I'm looking for an diagram tool for producing diagrams from text. I only really need sequence and state type diagrams for now, but I'm curious as to what people would recommend? I need something which is standalone, not a web based tool that works on Linux, OSX and Windows.

Answer

Michael Mrozek picture Michael Mrozek · Apr 22, 2010

I'm not positive what you mean by "producing diagrams from text", but if you mean a tool where diagrams are specified by a text file, Graphviz is good. If you mean something that literally converts ascii art like

+--------+   +-------+    +-------+
|        | --+ ditaa +--> |       |
|  Text  |   +-------+    |diagram|
|Document|   |!magic!|    |       |
|     {d}|   |       |    |       |
+---+----+   +-------+    +-------+
    :                         ^
    |       Lots of work      |
    +-------------------------+

to a graphic:

enter image description here

You can try ditaa (that ascii art is from their website, so it's a good example of the input format it expects)

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