Typesetting Tree Diagrams

[Pi-Cla]

Are there any good SILE packages for typesetting diagrams?
I would prefer that diagrams can be written in a markdown-like format such as mermaid.js

[Omikhleia]

There's Graphviz DOT via my embedders.sile, which is actually a dependency of markdown.sile.

[Pi-Cla]

Sorry, I have been busy with a lot of other stuff. I will give this a try when I have time

[Omikhleia]

To further this discussion... I was looking at the Lua Graphics Toolkit recently, and it turns out (just Googling for 5 seconds, 'cause I am busy with lots of other stuff too, heh...) that back in 2018, some Japanese users also experimented SILE + the Lua Graphics Toolkit:
https://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~kyodo/kokyuroku/contents/pdf/2067-12.pdf

(I can't read Japanese, but see §3.1)

Erm. Maybe something more "integrated" could be considered?

Well, if people are not too busy that is, obviously, to try answers to questions they asks.
( Yes, I'm a nasty person 🤣 )

[alerque]

That's news to me too, but pretty cool. Really the same effect could be handled with any graphics library, but since it happens to be in Lua it would fit really well as an easy to install module. We should really write a lightweight wrapper module for that that covers the file handling automatically, perhaps transfers some units and font contexts into the environment automatically, and lets people get down to business.

[Omikhleia]

The Lua Graphics Toolkit, unfortunately, was never updated and mandates Lua 5.1.

[alerque]

It doesn't look like it would actually be that much work to revive it with Lua 5.4 support if we really wanted to. I haven't looked into too specifically what it does, but the ABI changes needed to port code targeting 5.1 to newer (with backwards compatibility) are not very large.

That being said also don't forget that Rust libraries are on the table now. Pretty much anything out there for Rust is something we can build and make available to Lua.

[Omikhleia]

Very new, maybe to follow however: https://github.com/1jehuang/mermaid-rs-renderer

In my embedders.sile mentioned above, I once considered mermaid (as an interesting alternative to the good old graphviz), but while it would have been doable with mermaid-cli, spawning a headless browser is some kind of heavy overkill... This project here is Rust-based only (no browser needed), so perhaps a 3rd-party SILE package with proper bindings could offer a very interesting and more integrated approach (incl. generating diagrams with Lua)?