I love the idea of being able to do graphical things with textual input, it is just so much more efficient than futzing around with a mouse. That’s why I have taken to doing most of my documentation, writings and even all of my websites with Markdown.
So I wanted to put together a Gannt Chart one day and was just so annoyed with trying to do it in Excel that I made a Python script to do it for me. It basically takes a Markdown like input file and transforms it into a reasonably useful Gantt Chart, hence GanttDown! It works great and looks nice as the pictures on the site show, however it uses Matplotlib as the core Chart generator. This makes it rather powerful, but is also quite heavy to share, setup and distribute at this point. It would likely need to be ported to a Java Script implementation to be more useful or I could turn it into a web service of some sort, but for now it works well for my purposes. If there happens to be some more interest I will certainly take a deeper dive into this concept and a few other similar ideas I have been kicking around…