| Walt Mankowski via plug on 24 May 2022 16:47:37 -0700 |
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| Re: [PLUG] Free SVG IT/network architecture images? |
On Tue, May 24, 2022 at 05:26:39PM -0400, JP Vossen via plug wrote: > Graphviz was written 30+ years ago [1] at AT&T, and the detailed but incredibly dry and hard to use docs make me think it was was some by academics in a way back room. The code is only slightly harder than Mermaid to write, and it doesn't get any harder when you want to exert a bit of control. I also like the output better. I guess that puts me more on the 80's academic than flashy web side, but that should surprise no one. :-) The allure to me about graphviz is that it's really easy to make decent looking graphs by writing very simple plain ascii input files. Basically you describe the problem, and it makes the graph! Awesome! The problem I've always had with it, though, is that when you try to anything remotely complicated, it will start making what seem to be odd decisions about where some of the lines should go. And once that happens, good luck. You'll spend the next 2 hours trying in vain to get that one line to go across the bottom instead of the top, before giving up in frustration. I feel like I should at least mention TikZ[1] in this thread. It's where some of us in my lab went when we got frustrated with the limitations of graphviz. Good things about TikZ: * ASCII input * It makes beautiful diagrams[2] * Much more fine-grained control than graphviz * Programmable, to a certain extent[3] There are few a cons, though: * It's not particularly, simple, though. This is mainly because... * It's an add-in package for LaTeX Walt 1. https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/TikZ_package 2. https://texample.net/tikz/examples/all/ 3. https://texample.net/tikz/examples/complete-graph/ ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug