# Manual

## Overview

The original idea was to parse ASCII art images, embedded in reST documents and output an image. This would mean that simple illustrations could be embedded as ASCII art in the reST source and still look nice when converted to e.g. HTML.

aafigure can be used to write documents that contain drawings in plain text documents and these drawings are converted to appropriate formats for e.g. HTML or PDF versions of the same document.

Since then aafigure also grew into a standalone application providing a command line tool for ASCII art to image conversion.

### ASCII Art

The term “ASCII Art” describes a wide field.

- (small) drawings found in email signatures

- smilies :-)

- raster images (this was popular to print images on text only printers a few years ago)

- simple diagrams using lines, rectangles, arrows

aafigure aims to parse the last type of diagrams.

### Other text to image tools

There are of course also a lot of other tools doing text to image conversions of some sort. One of the main differences is typically that other tools use a description language to generate images from rules. This is a major difference to aafigure which aims to convert good looking diagrams/images etc. in text files to better looking images as bitmap or vector graphics. Here are some examples (by no means a complete list):

Graphviz

  Graphviz is a very popular tool that is excellent for displaying graphs and networks. It does this by reading a list of relations between nodes and it automatically finds the best way to place all the nodes in a visually appealing way.

  This is quite different from aafigure and both have their strengths. Graphviz is very well suited to document state machines, class hierarchies and other graphs.

Mscgen

  A tool that is specialized for sequence diagrams (used to describe software, UML).

ditaa

  Convert diagrams to images.

## Installation

### aafigure

    pip install aafigure

This installs a package that can be used from python (`import aafigure`) and a command line script called `aafigure`.

The Python Imaging Library (PIL) needs to be installed when support for bitmap formats is desired and it will need ReportLab for PDF output.

#### Requirements

- reportlab (for LaTeX/PDF output)

- PIL or Pillow (for any image format other than SVG or PDF)

## Usage

### Command line tool

    aafigure test.txt -t png -o test.png

The tool can also read from standard in and supports many options. Please look at the command’s help (or man page):

    aafigure --help