Text-to-chart is the process of describing a diagram in text form, and letting software render the actual output. I´ve been investigating the topic by examining Mermaid, a free software library created in 2014 by Knut Sveidqvist with a focus on development related charts, and ECharts, a flexible general-purpose diagramming solution that follows the code-to-chart approach. Unlike Mermaid, which uses a domain-specific language, ECharts is relying on JavaScript to describe the diagrams it renders.
Along the way I couldn´t resist to write two markdown-it plugins, allowing to integrate the charting solutions into your Markdown writing:
This document is my current state of learning the topic. All example charts are rendered by the mentioned plugins.