box-drawing test

2024-02-03

In my last blog post about the LC-3 virtual machine, I made a few diagrams with ASCII art. I found out recently that I didn’t have to use + and - and | symbols to make boxes; Unicode has symbols specifically for that. So I’m going to use this blog post as a playground for box-drawing.

The symbols used here are all copied directly from this Wikipedia article.

boxdraw kit

smooth box
╭─╮││╰─╯

jagged box
┌─┐││└─┘

heavy box
┏━┓┃┃┗━┛

wires
┌─┐│└┘┬┴┤├┼

arrows
←→↓↑↔↕

dotted
⋯⋮┄┈┊

To make boxes using the kit, copy-paste one of the “box” symbol sets, put newlines, and then expand the box to fit the text:

╭─╮││╰─╯

╭─╮
││
╰─╯
╭────────────╮
│ hello guys │
╰────────────╯

Put spacing around the text, too.

the diagram from last time but smoother ooOOOooo

    registers
    ┌─┐┌─┐┌─┐┌─┐┌─┐
    └─┘└─┘└─┘└─┘└─┘
    ┌─┐┌─┐┌─┐┌─┐┌─┐
    └─┘└─┘└─┘└─┘└─┘
    ╭─────────────╮     ╭────────────────────────╮
    │             │     │                        │
    │  processor  ├─────┤         memory         │
    │             │     │                        │
    ╰─────────────╯     │                        │
                        ╰────────────────────────╯

Note how the place the wire connects to each box is a different character (┤) that makes it attached.

╭───────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│                                                   │
│                                                   │
│                                                   │
│             a big funny box (smooth)              │
│                                                   │
│                                                   │
│                                                   │
╰───────────────────────┬───────────────────────────╯
                        │
              ╭─────────┴─────────╮
              │ boxes interlinked │
              ╰───────────────────╯
                 ┌────────────┐
                 │ not smooth │
                 └────────────┘

               ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
               ┃ a weighty box ┃
               ┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

╭─────────────────────╮
│ wires (plus arrows) │
╰──┬──────────────────╯
   ├────────┬────┐
 ←─┼──────┐ │    └─→         
   │      │ │                
   └──────┴─┤              
            │ ↑               
            │ │              
            ├─┘
            ↓

(The vertical arrows are slightly janky.)

          ╭────────────────────────────╮
⋯ ┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄│ this goes off somewhere... │
          ╰────────────────────────────╯
                       ┊
                       ┊
                       ⋮