Drawing database schema or state machine figure within RestructuredText [closed] - doc

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What is a technique or a tool that I can use to draw schema figures within RestructuredText?
I do not want to import png, jpeg,.. for simple stuff.
What I am looking is, a RestructuredText equivalent for TikZ in Latex to draw, e.g., state machine. It greatly speeds up documentation writing.
I use rst2pdf to generate my documents.

Answer 1

There is nothing built-in to reStructuredText that can achieve this. Personally I would just include the images you need as images. ReStructuredText is designed to be human readable, and including in a reStructuredText document some additional graphics-specific markup language goes against this somewhat (in my opinion). I would keep the markup needed to draw your graphics in separate files in the same directory as your reStructuredText file and have a script automatically generate the images, which are then included in your document.
However, reStructuredText is, of course, extensible, so you can write your own custom directive for drawing charts, similar to siafoo.net. Note that I have never used this, it just looks like a good place to start.

Answer 2

I have ended up with graphviz. To keep it simple (without sphinx), I created a Makefile that compiles dot into svg:
figures/main_components.dot
main.rst
Makefile
Makefile:
generate_figures:
for f in $$(find . -iname *.dot); do \
f_dir=$$(dirname $$f); \
f_name=$$(basename $$f); \
f_name="$${f_name%.*}";\
dot -Tsvg $$f -o $$f_dir/$$f_name.svg; \
done;
In main.rst, I use the svg-s.
.. figure:: figures/main_components.svg
:scale: 50%