Asciiflow

Posted5 months agoActive5 months ago

marcodiego

143 points

34 comments

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Ascii ArtDiagramming ToolsConversion_rate_optimization

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Ascii Art

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Conversion_rate_optimization

The ASCIIFlow tool is sparking a lively debate about character encoding, with users questioning whether the "ASCII" export option truly outputs ASCII or UTF-8. Commenters are chiming in with insights, pointing out that while ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, the box-drawing characters used in ASCIIFlow are actually encoded above 127, making them non-ASCII. As the discussion unfolds, it becomes clear that the export options have been updated to "ASCII Basic" and "ASCII Extended", with "Basic" now generating plus signs for corners, resolving some of the confusion. Meanwhile, others are sharing their experiences with the tool, highlighting both its cool concept and some usability issues.

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Aug 27, 2025 at 8:10 AM EDT
5 months ago
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Discussion (34 comments)

Showing 34 comments

staplung

5 months ago

2 replies

Cool. One thing I found odd was that on export there are two listed formats. "ASCII" and "ASCII extended" but as far as I can tell, the ASCII version is actually outputting UTF-8. It's hard to tell for sure though because the output is just text that you can cut and paste and so it's difficult to know what conversions the browser or OS might be doing behind the scenes. But when I paste it into a text editor on my mac, it's definitely UTF-8, not ASCII encoded.

Which is probably more useful anyway given that if it really outputted ASCII encoded line drawing characters, you'd end up with gibberish on a system that assumed UTF-8 encoding.

ilovetux

5 months ago

2 replies

Disclaimer, I just pulled this quote from Google ai which probably took it from somewhere else, but I just wanted to provide a little context. ASCII encoded text is also valid utf8.

> The first 128 characters of Unicode, which are the same as the ASCII character set (characters 0-127), are encoded in UTF-8 using a single byte with the exact same binary value as their ASCII representation. This means that any file containing only ASCII characters is also a valid UTF-8 file

staplung

5 months ago

1 reply

Yes, but the box drawing characters in "ASCII" are all above 127 so they don't encode the same way. So that last AI generated sentence is basically false (or really misleading): ASCII files that consist only of characters in the lower 127 will also be valid UTF-8. But ASCII files that use characters above 127 will not be valid UTF-8.

Now, technically, ASCII only concerns the lower 127 characters. There's no single standard definition as to what the upper half of the byte space represents in ASCII itself so technically it's true that all valid ASCII files are valid UTF-8. By the same logic however, the box drawing characters are not ASCII. They're actually part of something called code page 437, which maps those bit patterns to box drawing characters. With other code pages they map to something else, often non-Latin characters or ones with accents.

So, the name ASCII flow is misleading and the the output options are too. ;-) Basically, if the high bit is set in UTF-8 it indicates that more than one byte is needed to represent the code point.

ilovetux

5 months ago

Granted, all of that is true, but GP specifically differentiated between ASCII and ASCII Extended, then GP went on to say that after choosing the ASCII option and pasting the text in a text editor on Mac it was reported as UTF-8, which I was pointing out would be true because if the ASCII option is chosen as opposed to the ASCII Extended option then what he ends up with (ASCII) is valid UTF-8 as reported by the text editor.

em3rgent0rdr

5 months ago

Indeed, UTF-8 "was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII: the first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single byte with the same binary value as ASCII, so that a UTF-8-encoded file using only those characters is identical to an ASCII file."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

numpad0

5 months ago

2 replies

20 20 78 78 78 ... Looks ASCII to me, Firefox on Windows. Could be OS.

16bytes

5 months ago

1 reply

" xxx"? That's the same in ASCII and UTF-8.

OP is asking what are the line-drawing characters encoded as e.g: "┌" and "┐".

Since the charset returned by the app is UTF-8, these will be interpreted and encoded as UTF-8 and not whatever "ASCII - Extended" means.

numpad0

5 months ago

that would be completely correct... sorry. the export options now read "ASCII Basic" and "ASCII Extended", and "Basic" generates plus signs for corners, as of now. I feel like the behavior might have changed. Extended option seem to use 0xE294xx range for lines.

1: https://gist.github.com/numpad0/7880ad1e3ed32b91d1ccf9c3374f...

craftkiller

5 months ago

Firefox on Linux: I just copied and pasted into emacs and did a M-x describe-char and got 0xE29480 which is definitely not ASCII: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2500

Also confirmed with hexl-mode (hex editor in emacs)

NoSalt

5 months ago

1 reply

Cool concept, but I couldn't get everything to work; namely the "Select & Move" on individual boxes or lines. The select area and move did work, though.

ctenb

5 months ago

It works for me, but differently than I first thought. You don't select and move line shapes as a whole, but only segments in a perpendicular direction

iamunr

5 months ago

1 reply

https://monodraw.helftone.com/

But now on web!

leohart

5 months ago

1 reply

I think monodraw is way better and at a one time price of $10, it's really is a fantastic piece of software.

stronglikedan

5 months ago

1 reply

too bad it's only for a not fantastic piece of OS

leohart

5 months ago

While True, I believe the reason Monodraw doesn't expand is because the ASCII / TUI tooling economy is not rewarding. There are few users and even fewer customers who are willing to pay for ASCII/TUI tools.

If you look at tooling companies annual revenue

- Atlassian: 1.4B - Jetbrains: 400M - Vercel: 100M - Supabase: 16M - Prisma: 10M (maybe?)

We dive into the long tail quickly. I would be very surprised if Monodraw make more than 1M a year. At that revenue, it's going to be hard to expand into a multi-platform / web strategy (especially if your existing product is platform-locked).

behnamoh

5 months ago

4 replies

Are there no-mouse alternatives? I hate drawing lines and boxes using mouse and I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

nonethewiser

5 months ago

1 reply

>I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

How would what it generates be any different than what you wrote?

inanutshellus

5 months ago

1 reply

He doesn't want to click and drag with his mouse. Instead he wants an input box that lets him say "make a box [30] columns wide and [4] rows tall".

behnamoh

5 months ago

Yes, exactly! Either in natural language or some DSL.

Aissen

5 months ago

1 reply

It was on HN recently, the open source text-to-diagram tool d2 just launched an ascii output mode: https://d2lang.com/blog/ascii/

behnamoh

5 months ago

This is really close to what I wanted, thanks!

jvinet

5 months ago

Mermaid is great for this, though the output will be an image, not ASCII.

https://mermaid.js.org

PhilipRoman

5 months ago

graph-easy? It doesn't give you a lot of control though

johnisgood

5 months ago

2 replies

There are lots of similar projects to this that made top HN the past week. Is there a list of it? I was not logged in and I lost history but the previous one I just saw earlier today was quite nice, too!

Edit: Oh apparently it was "Monodraw". There was yet another one besides that. I am all up for such tools. What was the name of the one that allowed you to specify the diagrams using some custom DSL which in turn would generate the diagrams themselves?

fmajid

5 months ago

1 reply

MermaidJS, Graphviz or PlantUML, perhaps?

johnisgood

5 months ago

1 reply

It was https://d2lang.com/, but I am favoriting this thread.

fmajid

5 months ago

1 reply

Thanks, I did not know about this one. Reminiscent of https://diagrams.mingrammer.com