Blockding introduction
(This is almost translation of blockding author tk0miya's blog http://d.hatena.ne.jp/tk0miya/20111202 )
Blockdiag is an diagram generator. It can generate diagram images from text sources.
Blockdiag has several families.
- blockdiag
- blockdiagram, flowchart, state chart
- seqdiag
- sequence diagram
- actdiag
- activity diagram
- nwdiag
- network architecture
- rackdig
- drawing rack instance
Many users use MS-Office application such as Excel, PowerPoint or Visio. But most different point between these application and blockdiag family is a user can not edit layout. User can concentrate the definition.
Of course, this approach has pros/cons.
- Pros
- easy maintenance
- easy drawing
- easy editing because it's just a text
- auto generate with other tool
- Cons
- can not adjust
- can not draw over the tool support
- need to know the grammar
If you want to draw continuous changing images or quick drawing, blockdiag family is a good tool.
Interactive shell
Maybe you can not understand what is the blockdiag. Seeing is believing. Blockdiag has an Interactive shell. Whenever you type, the image is generated automatically.
For example,
{
A [label="Something"]
B [label="other"]
C [label="Blah"]
D [label="foo"]
A -> B -> C;
B -> D -> A;
}
draws like this.