gtk-perl makes ASCII world domination one step closer

[nadim khemir <nadim khemir net>]

Hi, while waiting for the decision to start a big project, I wondered about 
how to best document it. One big problem is to explain slightly complicated 
code without the explaination making it even harder to understand. 

"An image is worth thousand words" they say. 

"An ASCII diagram is worth thousands dia/kivio/visio/pp/etc.. diagram" I say!

gpad (gtk plain Ascii diagram) is a little application that let's you draw 
simple diagrams in ASCII (why isn't that part of the UML2 standard? ;)

gpad is not package properly yet. What I have can be found at 
http://khemir.net/files_for_download/

Some feable documentation and a total lack of structure, design and tests can 
be found in the tarball.

Future work:

well, I'm quite happy with it as it is so my plans are small:
        - hmm, save on exit if modified
        - save in text format too when saving in gpad format
        - multiline arrow
        - some smart routing mechanism (though it takes 5 s to do it by hand)
        - in place edition of gpad diagrams found in POD

gpad can without any doubt be made better, specially on the UI level. Don't 
search for evil in gpad as it's completely un-optimized. New ideas are 
welcome as is any kind of help with development.

Links to other (better) applications also welcome.

Let me know what you think about it and if you use it (I'm planning to use it 
for very serious work but there is some ASCII art potential (ASCIIshop 
someone?))

Cheers, Nadim.