> The only gripe I have is the possibility to introduce ASCII diagrams, which usually aren't accessible.

CAD software exports .stl files which can be processed into instructions for machines. That is, there is already software that can take lines on a screen and convert it to instructions for a machine. There's probably a way to annotate ASCII images of drawings (schematics, architectural) and output text "text* drawing of an object 14 centimeters by 5 centimeters, ..." Stuff like vinyl cutters (and even the proprietary cricut) can take vector graphics and convert them to instructions for a machine. so it, in theory, might be possible to just paste the ascii drawing text into some software: render ascii as .svg/vector, convert to 2d stl ("a layer"), convert stl to descriptive text. Since the software renders, you don't need OCR for the annotations, which are mostly instructions.

if there's no annotation, assume the '-', '_', '|', etc are to scale, and just use "units" as the dimensions instead of centimeters or whatever. |----| = 'two verticals separated with a 4 unit line'

Am i crazy?