(Site owner here)
Sorry that the site is down, it's hard to deal with spikes of traffic like this without over provisioning!
Just thought I would chime in, I'm working hard on a complete re-write of ASCIIFlow, killing GWT and moving to canvas + JS while keeping the ASCII look and feel, adding tools to resize things, and making the canvas size infinite and most importantly, supporting mobile!
Thanks for the great tool! By the way, is there a chance you would consider setting up a custom copy of ditaa on your server? The ditaa.org server seems dead quite long already (some year at least, I think? or is it just me?), unfortunately... Also, I'm kinda working on a Go port of ditaa (https://github.com/akavel/ditaa), but it's totally work in progress still, and just one of many hobby projects I push forward only from time to time...
(random user posted the link here) While writing text file design doc I was looking for a way to create boxes and stuffs like and came across your cool site. Just want to share & bookmark it via HN. Sorry for the unexpected traffic :D Thanks for this project !
It's a dated phrase referring to various one-byte-per-character encodings that include ASCII as a subset. Now that UTF-8 exists and is widely used, those encodings are useless until you decode them into Unicode anyway.
Box-drawing characters wouldn't give as much of the old school curses terminal hacker vibe.
And yes I am aware that they used to use graphical box drawing chars back in the day as well, but right now it's 2014 and it's the aesthetic that counts, too.
Damn, a customer. One of my final school projects in '91 was a text drawing program. Using it, I was amazed what effects I could get with text, background and foreground colours. Amongst other things it had line drawing, box fill with fg or bg colour.
Actually we made use of extended ASCII for our UI at the time ... you know, the solid bar/solid double bar, etc. So this isn't quite where we could have used it, but it's pretty close!
+-------+-----------+----------------+
| Also | supercool | to draw tables |
|-------|-----------|----------------|
| id | yeah yeah | this all day |
| stuff | and so on | long :) |
| time | i could do| |
+-------+-----------+----------------+
It is GWT, so it is transpiled to JS. I remember when I first saw this project years ago, I was impressed. Back then GWT was the best choice for statically-typed, large JS project development IMO.
We just chopped GWT out of our project a month or so ago; I'll fully admit that I didn't know much about it, but every step of the way I felt like I was battling it - it ended up being easier, faster and more testable to write our own JS for the front-end.
I do a lot of geometry related programming and the ability to add some graphic illustrations directly into the source code comes in handy every now and then.
Also, everybody needs a small ascii graphic in the output from time to time.
It's a clever tool for creating Ascii art. Not for everyone, but if you've ever tried to create boxes and lines in ascii, this is a tool that makes that so much easier .
This is something I might use in source code to describe / draw the relationship between elements.
The first schematic editor I ever used displayed with Regis graphics [1] on a VT125 terminal. But it only used a small subset of Regis. One escape sequence would put the terminal in a mode that mapped the 8th-bit set bytes to a bunch of arc- and line-segment glyphs that were entirely sufficient to display a circuit schematic. (And the 8th-bit clear bytes retained their ASCII encodings for labels.)
Drawing with these characters was very similar to these ascii drawings: one byte gave you a piece of a line (or an arc), and you built a grid of them. The schematic editor took a simple here's-the-grid-coordinate-of-an-element representation of the schematic, adjusted the offsets of the glyphs of that element, and built-up the grid of bytes to send to the terminal.
Really interested to know if you embed ASCII diagrams in your source code / store engineering diagrams in your project repos?
My take is that the closer documentation is to the code the more useful it is and more likely it will be updated. Would be great to have your feedback on a side project in this area, a chrome extension / web service to turn Umlet diagrams into SVGs when you're viewing them through GitHub. Check it out at https://github.com/CalumJEadie/umlet-github.
One issue: I seem to get the same behavior from "right angle" line mode and the "diagonal" line mode. I would have expected the latter to use the forward back slash characters.
