Charcoal

Process diagrams, redrawn in characters

Or try an example:

How Charcoal works

  1. Detect. Shapes are found as enclosed regions and classified: rounded boxes are tasks, circles are events (thin = start, thick = end, double = intermediate), diamonds are gateways. Long border lines give pools and lanes.
  2. Trace. Connectors are followed as horizontal and vertical segments; solid = sequence flow, dashed = message flow, dotted = association. The arrowhead decides direction.
  3. Read. Text is read with Tesseract OCR, then lightly spell-checked against a dictionary.
  4. Review. Fix anything that is off: click a shape or connector, change its type or text, reverse a connector, or add what was missed.
  5. Draw. The graph is laid out on a character grid that keeps your diagram's arrangement, then exported as text.

Notation


      
Privacy

      
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Works best with

      
Clean exports (PNG/JPG) with horizontal/vertical connectors — the default in Visio and most BPMN tools. Curved or diagonal connectors, hand-drawn sketches and photos are not supported yet.