Monkeybone

October 31st, 2009 · Anders Hesselbom · Comments Off

Monkeybone products hosted on this page are

  • The Monkeybone viewer for viewing Monkeybone images. Direct download.
  • The Monkeybone library for writing Monkeybone from any .NET program (ASP.NET, console applications, Windows Forms applications, and so on). Direct download.
  • The Monkeybox for creating and displaying Monkeybone images from within a Windows Forms application. Direct download.

Monkeybone characteristics
Monkeybone is a vector image format, mainly designed for producing bar charts and line charts. Monkeybone images are text files (UTF-8 with the .mod ending) that are interpretated using Regular Expressions. Each line is a drawing instruction (linefeed, \n, terminates each instruction) and arguments are separated using space. The first part of each line is the name of the drawing instruction, but arguments has no order. The format of the argument determines what the argument is. Examine this example that draws a line:

Line #00ff00 X1:10 Y1:10 X2:500 Y2:260

All arguments are optional, but you obviously want to specify most or all of them. The color of the line is not necessarily the first argument, but the argument that matches this regex pattern:

^#?([a-f]|[A-F]|[0-9]){3}(([a-f]|[A-F]|[0-9]){3})?$

The first X position of the line is not necessarily the second argument, but the argument that matches this regex pattern:

X1:[0-9]+

This short example displays a green triangle with a wavy bottom side:

Clear 150x150 #003366
Line #00ff00 X1:10 Y1:140 X2:75 Y2:10
Line #00ff00 X1:75 Y1:10 X2:140 Y2:140
Spline #00ff00 X1:10+0 Y1:140-20 X2:140+0 Y2:140+20

Comments
Any line that starts with double slash (//) will not be interpretated.

Instructions
Instructions include Bar, Blur, Clear, Diagram, DiagramBar, DiagramLine, Line, Noise, Region, Spline, Text and Tint.

News and download
Check the Monkeybone tag for news.

  • The viewer installation program can be downloaded from here. If you have a previous version of Monkeybone Viewer installed, don’t forget to uninstall that (from the Control Panel) before installing a new version.
  • Click here to download the Monkeybone .NET library.

The installation program for the viewer associates the *.mod file ending with the Monkeybone Viewer.

Monkeybone runs on Windows XP (shown above), Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Back to the Programs page.