[YLUG] Parsable Rack Diagrams

[Pete Fenelon]

On Tue, Aug 07, 2007 at 04:41:22PM +0100, Anthony Simpson wrote:
> I can't find anything like a developed solution for what you are trying
> to do but can I mention Graphviz - it contains a tool called lefty which
> can be scripted to any technical drawing task - its default file format
> "dot" is very human readable key:value format with a good syntax for
> node-node/node-subnode relationships. good binding for perl etc...
> probably worth a look but still a lot of work. If you fancy starting a
> project to build a real tool on lefty or something else I'd be keen to
> help out. 
> Tony
> 

It strikes me as the kind of thing you could probably find a LaTeX
package for if you were willing to trawl through CTAN. 

There is a pretty good LaTeX package for laying out memory maps (i.e.
piles of labelled boxes on top of each other with corresponding
addresses!) I wonder if that could be adapted to drawing a
representation of racks?

The 'classic' approach would be to define a 'little language' (like eqn
or pic or whatever) and build a simple filter for that. Of course these
days 'little language' probably means XML schema... (surely there's
something at enterprise level that allows description of racks?)

Hmmm. Which makes me think - could you frig a textual representation of
a UML Deployment Diagram  with some free-text to describe the boxes?

pete
-- 
pete at fenelon.com "how many clever men have called the sun a fool?"