Ring Diagram

ring Captain's Sphere of Influence

solid-fill

Captain | color: red
  Final word on heading and plunder,
  keeper of the ship's charter.

Quartermaster | Second-in-command, arbitrates disputes and divvies the booty

Crew | color: yellow
  Deckhands, gunners, and powder
  monkeys aboard the ship.

Allied Crews | color: green
  Loose alliances kept by oath
  or shared bounty in fair seas.

The Open Sea | color: blue
  Weather, currents, and rival
  flags beyond any captain's reach.

Overview

Ring diagrams show concentric layers of nested or hierarchical categories. Source order reads core-out: the first layer in the file is the innermost element (rendered as a filled disc), the last layer is the outermost ring. Min 2 layers, max 15.

Syntax

ring Title

[solid-fill]                 // optional directive

LayerLabel                   // innermost first
LayerLabel | color: blue
LayerLabel | color: green
  Indented description

The first line declares the chart type and an optional title. Each non-indented, non-directive line declares one layer.

Layers

ring Org Maturity

Pilot | color: yellow
Adoption | color: orange
Standard | color: green
Embedded | color: blue

Layer Pipe Metadata

Key	Type	Default	Description
`color`	palette name	auto-assigned	Ring color
`description`	string	—	One-liner shown in the side description list

Descriptions

Indented lines under a layer add description text. Markdown inline formatting is supported (**bold**, *italic*, `code`, [links](url)). Bullet points with - item render as • item.

Crew | color: green
  Deckhands and gunners.
  - Standing watch
  - Working the rigging

If both | description: text and indented lines exist, they concatenate (pipe first, then indented).

The shorthand form — bare text after | with no key: prefix — is taken as the description directly:

Quartermaster | Second-in-command, divvies the booty

Directives

Directive	Effect
`solid-fill`	Render rings with the full intent color instead of the default 25% tint.

inverted is not valid on ring diagrams (rings are rotationally symmetric — visual inversion is meaningless). Using it emits an error-severity diagnostic and the line is discarded.

Color Validation

Unknown color names emit an error-severity diagnostic with a “Did you mean…?” hint, and the layer falls back to its series color so the chart still renders. Allowed colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, teal, cyan, gray, black, white.

Rendering

Each ring is its own annular shape — concentric bands don’t overlap.
A 1px contrast stroke separates adjacent rings so similar tints don’t blur together.
Labels sit inside their ring band (innermost label centered on the disc, outer-ring labels stacked along the band’s vertical midline above center).
The side description list shows one entry per layer with a colored accent bar matching the ring.
When ring band thickness would force the label below the readable floor, in-band labels are skipped and the side list shows the layer names instead.

Complete Example

ring OSI Layered Model

solid-fill

Physical | color: red
  Cables, voltages, signal timing.

Data Link | color: orange
  Frames between adjacent nodes; MAC addressing.

Network | color: yellow
  IP routing across networks.

Transport | color: green
  End-to-end reliability; TCP and UDP.

Application | color: blue
  HTTP, SMTP, SSH — what the user sees.