Walt Mankowski via plug on 24 May 2022 19:00:38 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] Free SVG IT/network architecture images?

On Tue, May 24, 2022, at 9:14 PM, JP Vossen via plug wrote:
On 5/24/22 19:47, Walt Mankowski via plug wrote:
> 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!

Yup!

> 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.

Yup, I've already run into that and it's infuriating.  And I find it even worse in Mermaid.  That seems great if you have something really simple and you don't care much what it looks like.  Beyond that...good luck.

Still, for me, there are probably lots of cases where "something"--that may look a bit off but that I'm willing to do in Graphviz or Mermaid--is better than the "nothing" I'd have if I had to do it manually.

It depends a lot on what you're doing this for. Some good use cases include:
If it's something more customer-facing, or something you might want to use in a presentation, then it might be worthwhile to use one of the fancy GUI apps.

> 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:
...

It sounded interesting until I got to "it's an add-in package for LaTeX."  I have nothing against LaTeX, but I don't know it, and I've already gone far deeper down 2 rabbit holes than I really wanted to, I can't add another or I'll never surface again.  :-)file:///home/waltman/drexel/thesis/dissertation/figures/canon_sym.pdf


Yeah, when the first step is "learn LaTeX" that's going to be an issue for most people. :)

It does make nice graphs, though, as you can see from the figure I've attached from my dissertation. But there's definitely a learning curve. I knew LaTeX pretty well by the time I made that, and I still needed help from our local expert to make it look nice.

> Since you love stick figure diagrams, have you taken a look at Asciio (https://metacpan.org/pod/App::Asciio)?

I don't love them, someone else at work did some, and there was much amusement.

But that does bring up another set of tools I discounted, which are ones that translate Ascii-art diagrams into fancy ones.  I'm not going down that road because the entire point is--I don't want to draw it in the first place!  I'd _assume_ that those would give you the same placement control you'd get from any other "drawing" tool though.

It's been a long time since I played with Asciio, but as I recall it was trying to be a simple Visio-style app for ASCII art. So you can do all the basic things like place objects wherever you want, move them around, connect them with lines, have the lines move when you move the objects, etc.

Walt

Attachment: canon_sym.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

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