mermaid-cli VS pom-visualizer-maven-plugin

I'm one of the maintainers of the mermaid-cli project, and unfortunately, no.

Mermaid needs a browser's layout engine to run properly [1], but I haven't yet seen a library that will help us without puppeteer.

And yep, NPM (or another Node.JS package manager) is still needed for installation. I was working on trying to bundle all of mermaid-cli's dependencies (aka Node.JS, puppeteer) into one massive single-file exe last weekend, but it's seems we're blocked by missing features in other packages [2].

If anyone has any ideas on how to implement these things easily, feel free to help-out :) I'm also not a big fan of puppeteer, so I'd love to see a way to go without it.

[1]: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/issues/3650

[2]: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli/issues/467#issueco...

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)

Shameless plug, but I used mermaid.js to create a pom visualizer maven plugin [0] and it was honestly pretty great.

Like some of the other comments say (and after working with it quite a bit) it definitely has its warts. It's not super well documented, it's not as feature rich as I'd like, and the syntax can be a little wonky. All that said, it "just works" for creating simple visualizations and fit my use case near perfectly.

[0]: https://github.com/floverfelt/pom-visualizer-maven-plugin