This is a working example of using ditaa Ascii art in an Asciidoc document. It is based on a post on Ivo’s blog.

Setting up ditaa

  1. Ubuntu 10.04 Java installation 

    sudo add-apt-repository 'deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner'
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

  2. Check out ditaa 

    svn co https://ditaa.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ditaa ditaa

  3. Test 

    cd ditaa/trunk/web/lib
java -jar ditaa0_9.jar

  4. Test with a real diagram

Run ditaa on this file in sample1.txt:

+-------------+     +-------------+
|             |     |             |
|  SUPER      |---->|  CONDUCTING |
|             |     +-------------+
+-------------+
java -jar ditaa0_9.jar sample1.txt

This writes the file sample1.png:

sample1.png

Above, we manually included the png image into this Asciidoc text. The final section of this document will automate the process.

Ditaa within Asciidoc

For this we pre-process the Asciidoc source using Ivo’s handleimages.py script. We’ll run it on the very document you’re reading, which should convert the image below to a png that gets included back in the final html.

Sample drawing

To perform this conversion our Asciidoc command will be augmented as such:

./handleimages.py ditaa_asciidoc.txt | asciidoc -o ditaa_asciidoc.html -