Paperchart Flowchart

paperchart — flowchart

Layered flowchart. Nodes pick from five shapes; edges are orthogonal with triangular arrowheads; optional per-edge labels sit on the bend with a small bg-tinted box so they read over any crossing line.

When to use

• Request / response pipelines with decisions.
• Retrieval, indexing, or build pipelines with retry branches.
• Any DAG where shape conveys role (terminal vs. decision vs. process vs. store).

Input shape

{
  "data": {
    "direction": "TD",
    "nodes": [
      { "id": "q",     "label": "user query",     "shape": "stadium" },
      { "id": "norm",  "label": "normalize",      "caption": "lower + nfc", "shape": "rect" },
      { "id": "cache", "label": "cache hit?",     "shape": "diamond" },
      { "id": "idx",   "label": "fetch pack",     "caption": "brotli decode", "shape": "cylinder" },
      { "id": "score", "label": "score + rank",   "shape": "rect", "accent": true },
      { "id": "out",   "label": "render results", "shape": "stadium" }
    ],
    "edges": [
      { "from": "q",     "to": "norm" },
      { "from": "norm",  "to": "cache" },
      { "from": "cache", "to": "idx",   "label": "no" },
      { "from": "cache", "to": "out",   "label": "yes" },
      { "from": "idx",   "to": "score" },
      { "from": "score", "to": "out" }
    ]
  }
}

Node shapes

Accents

• node.accent: true — outlines the node in accent and fills with panel tint.
• edge.accent: true — colors the arrow in accent (e.g. the happy path).
• edge.dashed: true — dashed line (retry, fallback, feedback edge).

Direction

TD (top-down, default) or LR (left-to-right). The layout recomputes layers accordingly; the back-edge detector is direction-agnostic.

CLI

paperchart flowchart -i data.json -o flow.png
paperchart flowchart --defaults -o flow.png