On Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 04:24:39PM -0400, tpeplt wrote:
> Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> >>
> >> Have you been drawing your helpful diagrams using Emacs’s ability to
> >> insert individual graphic characters (for example, ┌, ┴, ┤), or is there
> >> a package that you can recommend that allows for describing the
> >> diagrams, and then draws them?
> >
> > I built an Emacs reimplementation of the line drawing workflow I
> > remember from MS-DOS-based Multi-Edit and DOS Navigator. (You
> > basically hold down Shift and move point with the arrows, and it draws
> > over where you move, joining lines as necessary.)
> >
> > Unfortunately, it’s not currently published, and it has a few known
> > bugs.
> 
> OK.  Thanks.  It looks as though Emacs’s built-in ‘artist-mode’ works
> similarly, but when I tried it, it used ASCII characters instead of
> graphic characters.

Perhaps you're searching for `artist-select-line-char' and friends.

>                    Either way, I was hoping that there was a tool that
> allowed for descriptions of the diagram elements instead of a
> keyboard/mouse WYSIWYG tool.  This would allow a user to describe the
> diagram elements and connections and would then generate the diagram.
> It doesn’t appear that anyone has yet written this tool for Emacs.  Or,
> if it has been, it has not been adopted by Emacs users on this mailing
> list.

I think this is due to the nature of the problem: compare, e.g. the
Graphviz suite to TiKZ/PGF and you'll see that "drawing an image
declaratively" is so huge a field that you end up with quite different
languages :-)

That said, me, too, have wished from time to time to be able to do
it in elisp.

Cheers
--  
t