pic: does anyone use it for diagrams? is there a version that outputs svg? (vs. troff or TeX)

Question

I'm in the middle of reading More Programming Pearls and read the chapter on the Pic language (see also Kernighan's paper) with some interest.

Anyone out there using it? It seems like it might be fairly easily translatable into SVG. There's a GNU version (w/ docs by Eric Raymond!) but it only outputs groff and TeX.

Answer 1

I use it. It's really handy for drawing sequence diagrams, in plain text - which you can then version control.

I've messed about with WYSIWYG UML diagram editors in the past, and have come to the conclusion that plain text is a far more reliable option.

Which would you rather? 80 lines of text or a 500kb zip file containing impenetrable XML?

The language is so so tiny, yet expressive - you can learn it in a day or two.

Use it for:

• Component dependency diagrams
• Flow diagrams
• Sequence diagrams
• Server room layouts
• Floor-plans

Basically... Any diagram which doesn't need to be slapped on a website with a beta/web 2.0 sticker. It's not amazingly beautiful, however, it gets the job done.

More resources:

Archive of http://www.umlgraph.org from 2016

http://floppsie.comp.glam.ac.uk/Glamorgan/gaius/web/pic.html