What's new in 0.5

spinagram 0.5 takes on the slides that still needed hand-placed coordinates in 0.4: phase bands, cards laid out inside a zone, processes that wrap onto several rows, and edges that cut through zone headers. You declare the zone and the steps; the engine places the cards and routes the edges.

The source is docs/diagrams/release_0_5.py. It places no card by hand: only the snake, the bands and the zone widths have coordinates.

Edges stay off zone headersCopy Anchor Link

route="ortho" routes around zone headers, as it routes around boxes. check reports a straight edge that crosses a header as edge-crosses-zone-header (P0), and check --fix moves its anchors to the first pair of side fractions that clears every header, or switches it to route: ortho. A header can also sit on the right (header="right") or be left out (header="none").

Centred icons clear of the textCopy Anchor Link

A centred icon reserves its height: the text starts 8 px below it, and the icon shrinks to 24 px before the text does (defaults.node.icon_text_gap, icon_min). check reports an icon over its own text as icon-overlaps-text (P0) and fixes it with a taller box. align="auto" picks a centred icon for tall cards and a left icon for wide ones.

Zones that hold rowsCopy Anchor Link

with d.zone("Observe", band=(560, 790)):
    d.row(["Metrics", "Logs", "Traces"], cols=3)

band=(y0, y1) spans a zone across the safe width. A row or column inside it needs no coordinates: the engine places it below the header, centred or at the start or end, and cols=N gives each card 1/N of the width. d.row(items) with no size returns the nodes. Edges reach a point of a zone's outline with z.top, z.at_top(0.8) and the other side helpers.

SnakesCopy Anchor Link

d.snake(steps, cols=4, y=170, h=100, zones=["Build", "Release"])

A long process wraps onto rows of cols cards, each row in its own zone if you want, chained by edges that turn between rows clear of the headers. Rows alternate direction (mode="boustrophedon") or all run left to right (mode="restart"). YAML: snakes:.

Even text in a rowCopy Anchor Link

same_text_scale=True on a row or column gives every member the same title and body size, so one long title does not leave its card with smaller text. Without it, check reports sizes that differ by more than 10 % as text-scale-mismatch.

HelpersCopy Anchor Link

• d["api"] returns a node or zone by id.
• d.distribute(n, w, gap, within=(x0, x1)) returns the x of n boxes centred in a span, or equal widths that fill it.
• route="elbow" with mid= draws an edge with two bends at a chosen x or y.
• origin="safe" measures coordinates from the canvas margin, so x=0, y=0 is the safe area's corner.

ThemesCopy Anchor Link

• By name. --theme acme also looks in each SPINAGRAM_THEME_PATH directory and in installed packages that register a spinagram.themes entry point. The error lists every place it searched.
• Glyph map. text: {glyph_map: {"→": "->"}} replaces characters the brand font lacks, in facts too; check lists each one as glyph-mapped.
• Vendor icons. check reports a generic icon on a box that names a cloud service (icon-generic-for-service), and icons: {prefer_vendor_for_services: true} swaps it for the vendor icon.

Smaller SVGsCopy Anchor Link

SVGs now embed only the characters they draw from each font. render --fonts embed keeps whole font files (the 0.4 output), and --fonts link embeds none and imports Google Fonts instead. In Python, use to_svg(scene, fonts=...) or spinagram.render(..., backend_options={"svg": {"fonts": "link"}}).

Layout engine guide →

Also in 0.5Copy Anchor Link

• zone-underused counts nested zones as content, so a Region that holds a VPC is not reported.
• check --fix on a Python spec with origin="safe" prints label positions in the spec's coordinates.