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.