Charts for Your Notes
Most dgmo chart types are built for engineering docs: sequence diagrams, infrastructure maps, gantt plans. Five are built for a personal note instead. This page follows one trip to Japan, for Chidi Okafor’s 50th birthday: the days until it, the travel agent’s office hours, the route, and the money saved for it, plus a family tree for the people in your notes. Each one is a few lines of plain text in a dgmo fence, so it sits in the note beside the prose and stays searchable.
| Type | What it answers | Live? |
|---|---|---|
countdown | How many days until it happens? | Ticks every second |
clock | Is their office open right now? | Ticks every second |
family | Who is related to whom, and how? | — |
map | Where does the trip go? | — |
goal | How close am I to the number? | — |
countdown and clock are the two live chart types: on a live surface — an Obsidian note, the Diagrammo app, the web editor, a docs page — they recompute against your clock every time the note opens and tick while you read it. In a PNG or SVG export they show the moment they were exported, because an image cannot tick.
Countdown — the days until something
For something that comes back every year — a birthday, an anniversary — give it a title and since with the date it first happened. The countdown always shows the next one and rolls forward on its own once the day passes, so the note never goes stale:
since-label Nth Birthday adds the count (“50th Birthday”) above the days. For a one-off date, write target 2027-04-15 instead of since; once it passes, it counts up, or shows your expired text. Monthly and weekly cadences, timezones and captions are on the countdown page.
Clock — when someone far away is free
A clock is most useful as a note about one person or office in another timezone: the travel agent booking the trip, or a friend coming along from abroad. Name their zone, label the panel, and the note answers “can I call now?” whenever you open it:
hours and days set the office’s working week, and color-by work shows it green while the office is open, amber in its last hour and grey once it closes. Each line is one panel; write a city, an IANA zone such as Europe/Lisbon, or an offset such as UTC+1. Analog faces, 24-hour time and sunrise lines are on the clock page.
Family — who is who
A family chart draws a tree from one line per person and one line per couple, with their children indented below:
It is a good fit for a note kept before a wedding or a reunion, or for a genealogy vault. Remarriage, adoption, deceased relatives and generation labels are on the family page.
Map — the route of a trip
A map draws a trip from a route line and one indented leg per stop. ~> draws a leg as an arc and -> as a straight line, and text inside the arrow labels the leg:
You never pick a projection or a zoom: the map frames itself around the places you name, so this one shows Japan. poi puts a label of your own on a stop. Shading countries, tagging places and live clocks on pins are on the map page.
Goal — how close you are to a number
A goal is a progress bar, a thermometer or a gauge, drawn from now and target:
Update now as the number moves. The goal page has the three faces and the colour options.
Putting one in a note
- Obsidian — install the Diagrammo Diagrams community plugin, then write a fenced code block with the
dgmolanguage tag. The chart renders in reading mode and in live preview, on desktop and on mobile. The Obsidian setup page has the setup steps, and the blog post Five Charts for an Obsidian Note walks through these charts in one trip note. - Anywhere else — paste the same fence into the online editor or the Diagrammo app, or into a docs site set up as in Embedding in Your Docs.
The source is the same everywhere, so a block copied from this page works unchanged in a note.