Techniques
Presentation diagrams — illustration art with connection points
The slide-deck idiom: detailed illustrations (people, buildings, servers, vehicles) instead of stroke icons, with relations glued to the artwork’s declared connection anchors.
ddn@1New DDN source
Why use it?
Stakeholder communication reads pictures faster than notation; an art pack gives the deck idiom without giving up a real model underneath.
When it helps
Executive overviews, sales and training material, any audience that should see a factory, not a rect labelled factory.
How to read it
- Separate the semantic role from its optional illustration.
- Connections still bind declared definitions and members.
- Review missing-asset diagnostics instead of treating a placeholder as the intended illustration.
What you need
- The model
- A registered art pack (CLI --pack or registerArtPack)
- x_art per node
Things to check
- Art is presentation: without the pack registered, every node draws an honest placeholder — never fake the artwork inline.
- Do not put fields on art nodes; the illustration owns the body area.
Scope of this diagram
Host-registered packs only (never inlined into the tools); 64 KiB per item; anchors are the four side midpoints in the shipped pack.
Work with the converted example
- Open the viewer and select
overview. Inspect the rendered view and its source. - Open the designer. Keep the selected profile and inspect its legal palette and property controls.
- Change one displayed title or an appropriate data value. Apply the edit and check the resulting diagram.
- Run the verifier and review its diagnostics before moving complete content into review.
- Download your edited DDN source to retain the change.
The example uses the indentation-based ddn-next-1 dialect. The language guide explains reusable definitions, dotted data rows and explicit property blocks.