ditaa

ditaa is a small Command Line Interfaceutility written in Java, that can convert diagrams drawn using ascii art (as seen below), into proper bitmap graphics.

+--------+   +-------+    +-------+
|        | --+ ditaa +--> |       |
|  Text  |   +-------+    |diagram|
|Document|   |!magic!|    |       |
|     {d}|   |       |    |       |
+---+----+   +-------+    +-------+
    :                         ^
    |       Lots of work      |
    +-------------------------+

See also

• Ditaa diagrams can be used in Org Babel source blocks
• PlantUML is another plain text diagramming tool.