Blockdiag (simple diagram images generator)

See also

• http://blockdiag.com/

• http://interactive.blockdiag.com/

• http://www.slideshare.net/TakeshiKomiya/blockdiag-a-simple-diagram-generator

• http://blockdiag.com/en/blockdiag/sphinxcontrib.html

• https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sphinxcontrib-blockdiag

• https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx-contrib/src/e60f176286fe/blockdiag/setup.py

• http://mentors.debian.net/package/sphinxcontrib-blockdiag

• https://twitter.com/#!/tk0miya

Contents

• Blockdiag (simple diagram images generator)

  • Introduction

  • blockdiag pycon-japan-retrospective

Introduction

Once again thanks a lot for your prompt replies. In case you are curious or you ever have to face the same problem than I, I finally chose blockdiag.

With only a few statements:

.. blockdiag::

   {
      planners -> seq-mco -> seq-mco-planner-11;
      planners -> seq-mco -> seq-mco-planner-12;
      planners -> seq-mco -> "seq-mco-planner-1...";
      planners -> seq-opt -> seq-opt-planner-21;
      planners -> seq-opt -> seq-opt-planner-22;
      planners -> seq-opt -> "seq-mco-planner-2...";
      planners -> seq-sat -> seq-sat-planner-31;
      planners -> seq-sat -> seq-sat-planner-32;
      planners -> seq-sat -> "seq-mco-planner-3...";
      planners -> tempo-sat -> tempo-sat-planner-41;
      planners -> tempo-sat -> tempo-sat-planner-42;
      planners -> tempo-sat -> "seq-mco-planner-4...";
   }

I could generate the attached figure and embed it in the html and pdf docs generated with sphinx.

Just awesome!!

blockdiag pycon-japan-retrospective

See also

https://tarekziade.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/pycon-japan-retrospective/

Komiya Takeshi showed me his tool called blockdiag, which is a DSL you can use to add diagrams in your documentation. The nice thing is that it provides a Sphinx extension so you can add diagrams in your documentation through simple expressions, and have Sphinx generate for you the diagrams on the fly.

There’s even an interactive online shell: http://interactive.blockdiag.com/

I’ve challenged Komiya to write a few diagrams I have for some Mozilla projects using his tool, and it took a few seconds for him to build them. So, I am going to use this in the future.