Scalable Vector Graphics

Demo of ASCII art to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

Hacking on NaturalDocs to make SVG output -- Why?

I started using NaturalDocs for documenting my FPGA designs.  It’s useful to do timing diagrams and logic diagram in amongst the comments.  Doing ASCII art is all very well, but some pretty pictures go down a lot better :-)

So I hacked together an ASCII art to SVG converter, inspired by AAFigure which does a similar job in Python.

It’s still a work in progress, especially the logic gates type stuff, but the timing diagram part is usable.

You can see the sample output here and the input data used to create it.

And if you’d like to see the code in all it’s glory (it’s still in a debugging state so be kind :-), it’s all zipped up here.  Be aware, it’s written by someone who hasn’t written Perl for a few years, so if some of it reads like Python that’s because that’s mostly what I write SW in these days.  Unless it’s embedded C, but I can’t imagine writing an app like this in C!

Hopefully one day the code will make it into NaturalDocs proper.