This repository holds all documentation for the diagrams framework, including

• the website source
• tutorials
• user manual
• IRC logs
• blog posts
• related papers
• release checklists

and more.

Building

To build the website (which includes the gallery, user manual, and tutorials), you will need:

• GHC 7.6
• the diagrams framework itself (including the contrib package, SVGFonts package, palette package, and diagrams-builder package).
• Either the cairo backend (recommended) or the SVG backend (if you cannot build the cairo backend). See below for more information re: using the SVG backend.
• the python docutils suite (in particular rst2xml should be on your PATH).
• the Haskell docutils package (note it is not on Hackage; just clone the master branch from github and cabal install it).
• the latest version of shake.
• hakyll-4.x.
• safe.

Once you have all the dependencies, simply do

ghc --make Shake -threaded
./Shake +RTS -N4 -RTS preview

which will build the user manual and website, and run a web server on port 8000 serving a preview of the webiste. In place of -N4 you should use -NX where X is the number of cores you have. By default, the build system will use all but one of your available cores; if you wish to set the number to something else, set the DIA_DOC_THREADS environment variable.

Point your browser at localhost:8000 to view it. It works well to leave this invocation of Shake preview running, and then start another process calling Shake +RTS -NX -RTS build repeatedly in a loop. The website will now automatically be rebuilt any time any source files change.

For example, on a four-core Ubuntu machine, assuming you already have the Haskell Platform installed, and have cloned the relevant diagrams repositories from github, and want to use the cairo backend, you could issue the commands

sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev libcairo2-dev python-docutils
cabal install hsenv
hsenv --name=dia
.hsenv_dia/bin/activate
cabal install gtk2hs-buildtools
cabal install diagrams-core/ diagrams-lib/ diagrams-cairo/ diagrams-contrib/ diagrams-builder/ SVGFonts/ palette/ docutils/ shake hakyll safe
cd diagrams-doc
ghc --make Shake -threaded
./Shake +RTS -N4 -RTS preview

Building with diagrams-svg

The build system will first check for an installed diagrams-cairo package. If none is found, it will fall back to using the diagrams-svg package. This almost works, except for a few small issues:

• There are a few examples in the user manual and other tutorials which cannot build with diagrams-svg, because they use embedded images, which diagrams-svg cannot yet handle. As a workaround, the build system passes a --keepgoing flag to the utility that builds diagrams embedded in the user manual and tutorials, causing it to report success even when an example fails.

• There is also an explicit list of gallery examples which are excluded from the build when using diagrams-svg, since they only build with diagrams-cairo.

These issues should not cause too much trouble but are simply good to be aware of. Using diagrams-svg should be perfectly adequate for ensuring that your contributions to the documentation compile properly and look the way you expect.