Category: Echelon Reference Series

In my latest post I compared many color schemes for my diagrams. I talked about ‘printer friendly’ and ‘printer hostile’ styles, but I hadn’t tried the friendly versions. Header Design My object headers have six components. I’ll describe the common application of each element, though some objects have variant applications …

Until now, my workflow has included TikZ options in my taxonomy file. This worked well enough, as far as it went, but were at the ‘actual options’ level. That is, the detailed information, including color names and the like, that would go into the LaTeX source on conversion. This ended …

Rightfully this would be under ‘T’ for ‘Taxonomy’, that being the file I’m talking about. However, ‘T’ is still a couple weeks away, and I want to write about this now. Background Helper stage in my workflow provides metadata used across the game system, regardless of domain. <sys>-taxonomy.docx is the …

I have a strategy and updated workflow diagram, but now to figure out the actual plumbing. This post is mostly me thinking out loud, so don’t feel bad if it doesn’t make sense yet. That will come. Better LinkGraph First, I need better metadata in my diagrams. Known: I will …

The post title is a bit of a stretch, but that happens during the A-Z Blog Challenge. My recent realizations showed me I’ve got some work to do. Among other things, I see: I see the following changes in my workflow. I’m not totally certain where the interventions will go. …

In my latest post I said “I can automate this”. There were two last pieces I needed before I can automate diagram conversion. It turns out these both are solved more easily than I expected. Spanning Matrix Rows The normal layout behavior of a matrix node in TikZ is pretty …

DOT, the way I use it, lays out diagrams in a matrix. Before I automate converting these to TikZ matrices, I want to draw some by hand. Again, Angelic Blood is a good candidate to work from. Small enough to be manageable, large and complex enough to be interesting. Angelic …

As part of developing the Echelon Reference Series, I make heavy use of GraphViz. GraphViz includes several layout engines, but the key one here is called ‘DOT’. DOT takes a file with a simple declarative syntax of nodes and edges, and lays them out as a graph. You can specify …

This might derail my original plan (“Small Gods”) for the 2025 A-Z Blog Challenge, but I think it’ll be worth it. For me, at least. Recently I’ve been reading a couple of books about LaTeX, my publishing tool of choice. I’ve worked with LaTeX quite some time, and I’ve cobbled …