Post-termchart compositor layer (beautify + extend) — parked design

[ivanmkc]

Summary

A deterministic ASCII compositor that sits on top of termchart: it takes termchart's clean grid renders as components and arranges / annotates / decorates them into expressive, multi-column "explain-this-system" diagrams — while preserving termchart's exact alignment guarantees.

This reaches the kind of artifact people hand-draw to explain systems (parallel labeled columns, annotation banners, a box spanning columns, branch/merge flow between blocks, inline notes) — none of which Mermaid/termchart can express today.

📄 Full design (parked spec): docs/superpowers/specs/2026-06-02-post-termchart-compositor-layer-design.md

Status

🅿️ Parked — future feature. Design captured during brainstorming; not scheduled for implementation. No code until explicitly picked up.

Locked decisions

• termchart stays the base renderer (component renderer); not rewritten, beautiful-mermaid not replaced.
• Deterministic compositor — alignment guaranteed by construction (not LLM freehand, not generate-validate-repair).
• Beautify and extend, equally.
• One source of truth for width — reuses termchart's exact isFullwidth ranges + ANSI-aware maxLineWidth (ANSI = 0, box-drawing = 1, emoji/CJK = 2).
• Layout: grid of cells + constrained connectors (vertical drop-arrows; branch/merge into a column-spanning cell). No arbitrary routing in v1.
• Decoration palette (all routed through the width model): banner/figlet fonts · curated Unicode pseudo-fonts · box/line styles & weights · glyphs/icons/shading · color & text attributes.
• Language: TypeScript core in the monorepo (working name packages/compose), importing termchart's width/render functions directly. Optional Python front-end later (LLM spec-authoring / harness) that shells out to the TS binary.
• LLM role (optional, later): authors a declarative composition spec, never raw ASCII.

Open questions (decide when scheduled)

• Spec format — leaning YAML + JSON Schema (vs JSON-only vs a custom DSL).
• Connector anchor/merge semantics for unequal-width cells.
• Pseudo-font whitelist (which Unicode style ranges are width-stable) + verification method.
• Packaging — compose subcommand vs separate bin; shared flag parsing.

Out of scope (future extensions)

• Free-canvas + arbitrary routed connectors (extending the A* router).
• The cross-industry act+CI harness that runs this across many codebases (separate spec).
• The LLM spec-authoring front-end itself (separate spec).