mermaid-cli VS kroki

you can use mermaid-cli to create pngs/svgs

I come from past experiments with (py)graphviz, yed, probably a couple other forgotten things. (As well as manual diagrams in LucidChart and even Inkscape.) And am generally a non-web python guy.

I was looking at Mermaid last weekend, since a coworker has praised it a few times and I was wanting to play with it.

I think my expectation of how to use it was wrong? I typically expect to share my diagrams as .png files. The main documentation didn't seem to give much guidance in this usecase.

I ended up going to https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli ... there didn't seem to be a simple install-and-use pathway similar to `apt` or `pip`, so I ended up trying the docker image for it. I got it working to create pngs, but I thought having to mess with docker volume mounts and defining my own aliases (`alias mermaid='docker run -u $UID -it --rm -v ~/mermaid:/data minlag/mermaid-cli -i'` so I can do `mermaid blah.mmd` in my ~/mermaid folder) was a bit cumbersome...

Just sharing to see if there's hot takes on where I went wrong, I guess. (for example, I certainly didn't extensively read the docs to understand the usage paradigm it's intended for)

node cli tool if java isn’t your thing. https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli

Your wish showing up in the face of a submission just 14 days ago and then another 29 days ago must be indicative of why there are so many dupes all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=kroki.io

You can feel free to submit the GH repo, as that one doesn't seem to have been submitted before https://github.com/yuzutech/kroki

Pikchr https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow is the other general purpose one and older than d2. It is "Source-Code License: 0-clause BSD" as it says on the page.

Someone made it into wasm and put playground for pikchr here https://www.jakethaw.com/pikchr_webassembly_demo/

Can also try pikchr online here on https://kroki.io/#try which is hosting many other text to diagram tools as well.

I use mermaid.js heavily, but plug for Kroki:

https://kroki.io/

“Kroki provides a unified API with support for BlockDiag (BlockDiag, SeqDiag, ActDiag, NwDiag, PacketDiag, RackDiag), BPMN, Bytefield, C4 (with PlantUML), D2, DBML, Ditaa, Erd, Excalidraw, GraphViz, Mermaid, Nomnoml, Pikchr, PlantUML, Structurizr, SvgBob, Symbolator, TikZ, UMLet, Vega, Vega-Lite, WaveDrom, WireViz... and more to come!”

If you don't mind my asking, what aspects of "acceptable layout" is usually the first to get busted?

I'm extremely excited about using WireViz[1] to automate wiring harness diagram creation, and if I can, I'd like to know the speedbumps before I hit them. I'm thinkin generous linking between diagrams will be one path.

[1] Project:: https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz SandboxP:: https://kroki.io/#try [select Diagram>WireViz]

The SVG output is embedded into the PDF file.

https://kroki.io/examples.html#mind-map

Kroki has other text-based formats for flow charts, Gantt charts, UML diagrams, packet diagrams, network diagrams, word clouds, etc.

My cross-platform desktop text editor, KeenWrite, allows users to define variables in an external YAML file. The editor calls out to Kroki[1] to convert text-based diagrams to SVG. The diagrams can reference variables and are rendered using EchoSVG[2].

KeenWrite[3] can produce PDF documentation from Markdown documents that has PlantUML diagrams with elements stored in an external, machine-readable file. Here are screenshots showing variables on the left, diagram text in the middle, and a real-time render on the right:

* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

KeenWrite supports all diagrams offered by Kroki, which includes "diagram-plantuml".

[1]: https://kroki.io/

[2]: https://github.com/css4j/echosvg/

[3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite