Markdeep – plain text documents with diagrams, equations, and Markdown syntax

If I need graphic charts/diagrams, I've already passed the markdown stage. There's absolutely no workflow I can think of that is improved by my sitting there and trying to ASCII Art my way into a diagram. Does anyone go, hey, you know what would make my note-taking or web design faster and easier? Spending 20 minutes making an ascii art diagram instead of slapping the same three figures out in powerpoint in 20 seconds. I love markdown. It's an elegant…

Funny enough, browsing without Javascript resulted in the same plain text appearing in both windows. I was nearly ready to comment about how easy that is with a pair of <pre> tags. :) That said, I'm OK with it degrading like that. The text file is perfectly readable, and conveys the information within quite well. I even kind of preferred it. So, yeah. Great job, OP.

Markdeep has some very nice features. I love to be able to have more expressiveness than in regular markdown. But I am not so sure about the diagramming feature. Writing diagrams as ascii art seems like a PITA to me, especially when you need to update a diagram with new shapes, etc. For this I prefer PlantUML markdown integration: http://plantuml.com I use VS Code and it has a nice plugin to handle this.

If you'll indulge me for a moment, I have a story to tell: Many years ago, I had this idea of creating a documentation tool for my hobby projects that was based on Awk. I liked Doxygen, but it was a bit heavy duty for a small C library with only a handful of functions. You could almost guarantee that Awk would be available on the system where you might be compiling the project, so you could just bundle the…