mermaid-cli VS ob-mermaid

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

I see mermaid has both a major mode and babel support, as does plantuml.

Interested Emacs users should check out ob-mermaid[1]. It’s an org babel extension that lets you inline mermaid diagrams in org documents.

[1] https://github.com/arnm/ob-mermaid