Lini

Lini is an open source language and compiler for creating visual figures from plain text. It turns a source file into clean, themeable SVG, with one grammar covering everyday diagrams and more technical illustrations. The supported families include flowcharts, mind maps, organization charts, tables, entity relationship schemas, sequence diagrams, charts, circuit schematics, floor plans, and dimensioned engineering drawings. That range makes it useful when a project needs more than boxes and arrows but a team still wants every figure stored as readable text. Instead of dragging shapes around a canvas, authors describe nodes, links, structure, labels, and styles in a compact source format that can live beside the rest of a project.

The language splits responsibility in a practical way. Authors say what belongs in the figure and where its main parts should go, while the compiler handles repetitive drawing work such as routing a connector through available gaps, measuring a dimension, and choosing colors from its palette. A link can be expressed by naming two nodes, and Lini finds an orthogonal route that stays clear of other elements. Styles and children have concise syntax, so a small service diagram can define reusable box styling, group related services, place a database, and connect everything in only a few lines. People still control the intended structure, which distinguishes the workflow from image generation that interprets a prompt without a precise source representation.

Its output is designed for documentation and version controlled projects. Colors remain live CSS variables in the exported SVG, and each color uses a light and dark pair. One exported file can therefore respond to the viewer's operating system theme without JavaScript or another render pass. Host CSS can recolor diagrams across a site. The built in palette offers named hues with roles for backgrounds, softer fills, strokes, and text, while its color ramps use OKLCH. Compilation is deterministic, so the same input produces byte identical output that can be reviewed as a clean diff in continuous integration. The project says a typical figure compiles in about two milliseconds, and the native binary doesn't require Node, a browser process, or a separate runtime service.

Lini can be used from a terminal or explored in a browser. The command line compiler writes an SVG from a Lini source file, while its serve command opens a live reloading preview for one file or a directory of samples. The website includes a tour, reference, gallery, and a playground powered by the WebAssembly build. Finished examples are published with their source, which helps new users connect the syntax to the result. Editor support is available for VS Code and Zed. Because the format is text, it also fits workflows where diagrams need review, repeatable generation, or edits by both people and coding agents rather than ownership by one desktop design file.

Several integrations bring the same syntax into documentation systems. An mdBook preprocessor compiles Lini code fences to inline SVG during a build. A remark plugin works in environments such as Docusaurus, Next, MDX, Gatsby, and unified pipelines, and it can expose the source behind a figure. An Astro integration connects the compiler to Astro's Markdown processing. The WebAssembly package runs in Node, Bun, Deno, bundlers, and browsers, while the Rust crate lets developers use Lini as a library. The repository also provides a language brief for agents, a generated property schema, stable JSON diagnostics, and machine applicable fixes. Those pieces make it more than a standalone drawing command, especially for teams building automated publishing systems.

Lini is best suited to developers, technical writers, and engineers who value text sources, reproducible builds, and SVG output. Its single grammar is a strong fit when one documentation set mixes architecture diagrams with charts, schemas, sequences, or physical layouts. The tradeoff is that authors need to learn a purpose built language and take responsibility for the broad layout, so it won't replace a freeform visual editor for everyone. Lini is distributed under the MIT license and can be installed through Cargo. There isn't a commercial plan to evaluate or a hosted account to maintain. The public browser playground lowers the barrier to trying the syntax, while the local compiler keeps the durable workflow portable and independent of a hosted rendering service. Its frozen language contract for the current major version also gives teams a documented compatibility target for syntax, properties, defaults, diagnostics, and themes.