Re: diagrams-braille

[Brent Yorgey]

Hi Mario (also cc-ing the diagrams-discuss mailing list),

This is very cool!  And glad you've been enjoying diagrams.  It's been a long time since I've touched any backends but I will try to take a look at your Renderable Text instance and see if I have any suggestions.  I also wonder whether it would be possible to depend on diagrams-rasterific and reuse a lot of the code rather than forking it, but I haven't really looked into it.

We'd be happy to move diagrams-braille into the diagrams github organization if you like.  I've invited you to the organization so you should be able to move the repo, then I can make sure you still have access to it of course.

-Brent

On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 12:17 PM Mario Lang <ml...@blind.guru> wrote:

Hi.

I put together a backend based on a fork of diagrams-rasterific which outputs
unicode braille patterns in text mode a while ago, called
diagrams-braille[1].  The main difference to rasterific is that is does
not use fonts to draw text, rather it uses ascii letters.
This is obvously pretty limited, since text can no longer easily flow
in all directions, it gets quantized to the text mode grid.
However, this is actually an advantage to my use case, since I really
use it to "visualize" things on my braille display.  A font would be too
large and not easy to read.  A normal ascii string makes it possible
to attach readable labels to things.  However, I have to admit I just
hacked this together, and it barely works as expected.  I can use
baselineText to somehow do what I want, but other text drawing functions
behave a bit off.  I am blind, dealing with graphics is not my cup of
tea, even if I want to in this case...  I was sort of wondering/hoping
if I could convince you to review my

instance TypeableFloat n => Renderable (Text n) Braille

and maybe find an improvement on the current implementation?

Also, since there is a diagrams project on github, I was wondering if
you are interested in moving diagrams-braille there, so that it can be
more easily piced up by other diagrams users?

[1] https://github.com/mlang/diagrams-braille

P.S.: Thanks for diagrams!  Diving into its source code taught me a lot
of things.

--
CYa,
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