2025 – 2015: Posts tagged #tool

Text-to-chart is the process of describing a chart or 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 uses JavaScript to describe the diagrams it renders.

Along the way I couldn´t resist to create two markdown-it plugins which allow to integrate the charting solutions into your Markdown writing:

• markdown-it-mermaid-server, and
• markdown-it-responsive-echarts.

This document is my current state of learning the topic. All example charts are rendered by the mentioned plugins.

A command line tool to process multiple diagrams in one pass into SVG images.

A plugin to render ECharts with markdown-it.

A markdown-it plugin to render Mermaid charts on the server.

Make any HTML table sortable

An iA Writer template to create letters with correctly positioned address fields.

Highlight the entries of your table of contents while scrolling

File your workout routines and get a nice graphical overview of your achievements and improvements.

A virtual whiteboard to be shared by multiple people at the same time. Users will be anonymous – so no one needs to sign in.