drawio-skills

Academic Publication Overlay

Use drawio-academic-skills instead of the base skill whenever a diagram is intended for a paper, thesis, dissertation, journal, conference, IEEE/ACM submission, manuscript, camera-ready package, or Word/LaTeX publication.

Boundary

The overlay is deliberately thin:

• ../drawio owns the CLI, schema, renderer, themes, general workflows, examples, style presets, and Desktop export.
• drawio-academic-skills owns publication decisions, paper-readability gates, academic examples, and export checks.

Install both skills side by side. If ../drawio/scripts/cli.js is missing, stop and install the base skill; do not copy its runtime into the overlay.

Academic Preflight

Decide these points before rendering:

1. Venue and audience.
2. Figure type: architecture, roadmap, or workflow.
3. Color policy: monochrome, grayscale-safe accent, or color PDF.
4. Caption, title, legend, and abbreviation requirements.
5. Formula and text-position fidelity.
6. Print target and requested exports.
7. Node budget and whether the figure should be split.

meta:
  profile: academic-paper
  figureType: workflow
  theme: academic
  title: Experimental workflow
  print: { target: ieee-single }

Source Understanding And Plan Gate

For a paper, extract the research problem, evidence chain, method, mechanism, validation, findings, and contribution needed by the figure. For a reference image, inventory visible containers, labels, formulas, connectors, legends, colors, and uncertainty.

Present a concise diagram plan before rendering complex paper-derived figures or academic redraws. A simple, fully specified figure can proceed directly to YAML.

Optional Image Preview

An external image model may provide a concept preview after the plan is confirmed. It is optional and never becomes the final artifact.

• Ask before sending unpublished, confidential, proprietary, or sensitive material.
• Prefer a compact plan, short labels, layout intent, and style constraints over raw source documents.
• Treat generated text and formulas as approximate; correct them in YAML.
• Verify the exported Draw.io artifact, not the concept preview.

Delivery

The default academic final set is:

• editable <name>.drawio
• 300 DPI <name>.png from draw.io Desktop

When Desktop is unavailable, PNG export falls back to standalone SVG and must be reported. Keep .spec.yaml, .arch.json, normalized YAML, and diagnostics in a work directory.

node skills/drawio/scripts/cli.js input.yaml figure.drawio --validate --write-sidecars --sidecar-dir .drawio-tmp/figure --strict-warnings
node skills/drawio/scripts/cli.js input.yaml figure.png --validate --use-desktop

For IEEE or another vector submission, explicitly export PDF (or the venue-supported vector format). The default raster PNG is for review, Word, thesis, and raster-first delivery; it is not a substitute for a required vector submission.

Quality Gate

Before reporting completion, confirm:

• labels remain readable at the target print width
• node count is within the academic playbook budget
• formulas use supported delimiters
• CJK and Latin fonts resolve to the intended Times New Roman and SimSun stack
• colors are not the only carrier of meaning
• captions, legends, labels, and formulas are not clipped
• connector labels clear their lines and arrows do not cross text or nodes
• the exported PNG, fallback SVG, or requested Desktop artifact was inspected
• any visible defect was corrected in YAML and rerendered

The Academic Overlay never requires MCP or a live backend.

Related

• Workflows
• Replicating Diagrams
• Math Typesetting
• Export and Artifacts

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