Ask HN: Is there a tool to generate binary protocol figures out of a spec?

IIRC, thrift (https://thrift.apache.org/) could render defined types/structs to an SVG.

Edited to add: it’s the graphviz generator -> https://thrift.apache.org/tutorial/graphviz.html

I’d guess gRPC and other such IDLs have a way to render similar things as well.

I used Wavedrom to generate beautiful SVGs for a similar purpose in the past. Maybe it is useful for you, too:

https://github.com/wavedrom/wavedrom

Recently - 'Why isn't there an OpenAPI for binary formats': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30806032

You might find something suitable there, from what I recall there was some disagreement about whether there is or not depending on what the scope is of what you want to achieve.

Does this help with documentation and automatically create diagrams: https://github.com/gsingh93/ob-bitfield ? Was recently posted here on HN. Org format is a powerful format and it can be exported to many other formats using Emacs or maybe Pandoc.

https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk might help, it won't generate the visuals but can give you offsets

You can’t specify the width of a single bit in the diagram but I found https://www.luismg.com/protocol/ otherwise nice.

It’s ASCII though.

I think Kaitai had an export feature trough GraphViz (haven't tried it tho)

_edit_

Yeah, there's some samples on their page: https://formats.kaitai.io/rar/rar.svg

Not sure if that's what you're looking for?

This isn't used for bitfields (er, shouldn't really be), but you might find it useful for less granular parsing documentation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Diagrams

I've been using SVG bob as a wasm binary. Here is a demo: https://code.sgo.to/2021/12/07/ascii-diagrams.html

Not exactly what you’re looking for (this doesn’t generate an image from a spec/protocol), but I created a simple image encoding in ASCII and editor that generates PNG (choose “Still” instead of “Wobble”):

https://memalign.github.io/m/pceimage/index.html

I made this so I can embed images in code.

Maybe look into mermaid? It has like a dozen different modes.

I always appreciated the clarity of diagrams in TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1: The Protocols.[0] IIRC the diagrams were generated with graphviz using dot, which can output SVG. You can trivially post-process the SVG to alter fonts or other display related attributes as necessary.

In terms of data sources, you can potentially parse the metadata for known protocols out of a good protocol dissector like tcpdump[1] or Wireshark[2], or https://www.luismg.com/protocol/

See https://graphviz.readthedocs.io/en/stable/examples.html#stru... for a tabular example.

[0] A decade or more ago someone posted the source TeX. Unfortunately I lost it. If anyone has it, sharing is caring. [1] https://github.com/the-tcpdump-group/tcpdump [2] https://github.com/wireshark/wireshark/tree/master/epan/diss...

extraction not imho.

but the usual tools are pic (for diagrams) and grap (for graphs), as linked from here: http://n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html

this is the manual https://pikchr.org/home/uv/pic.pdf

I've also used postscript for extreme usages, the doctools can also include ps verbatim.

Can you send me a linkedin request to talk about it?