Declarative layout-engine figures

When to use

Your figure fits a row×column grid: network overview figures (backbone/neck/head columns with legends and column heads), deployment or phase flowcharts (stacked dashed phase frames), method framework diagrams. A declarative engine does layout, alignment and orthogonal routing; you only write the configuration — and the same config always renders the same figure.

The configs in this folder were authored for a local companion engine (grid + emphasis colors + lane-based orthogonal routing + dashed groups + captions + true sub/superscripts). The engine itself is not bundled here; the config syntax and workflow below are the transferable part — port them to your engine of choice, or keep them as the spec.

Config syntax (real examples in configs/)

• Node: name: main text | sub text @rRowcCol !blue — spans @r1-3c1 (rows), @r2c3-4 (columns); nat = natural-width narrow node; two nat nodes in one cell pack side-by-side.
• Column heads @head 1: Backbone; bottom legend @legend blue: P2 branch, orange: ACR; dashed phase group @group Training only : dashed … @end; bottom caption @caption ….
• Edges A -> B, colored A -> B !orange; sub text supports _{sub} ^{sup} (stackable: z^{T}_{c}) and \n forced line breaks.
• Text arrows like (32→64) inside node text are never mistaken for edges (position-based disambiguation).

Workflow (no-download SVG extraction)

1. Write the config; base64url-encode it into the hash: engine.html#c=<b64url>; success = window.__archState.ok === true.
2. Evaluate buildSVG(lastScene) in the page console — it returns the full SVG string (no browser download handling needed).
3. The exported width/height are float strings — later regexes must accept [\d.]+.
4. Export PNG via the hand-svg-structure inline-page pipeline.

Real configs (configs/)

• fig4-1.config.txt — network overview with column heads + legend + packed narrow-node pair.
• fig5-2.config.txt — teacher–student distillation training framework.
• fig6-2_convert.config.md — TensorRT deployment flow (two stacked dashed phase frames).