Mermaid VS d2

Mermaid JS is a tool that lets you create diagrams and charts such as flowcharts, sequence diagrams, Gantt charts using simple text commands. It works by converting your text commands into a graphical representation that you can customize and share. https://mermaid.live/

I'm not OP, but I just ask GPT to turn code or process or whatever else into a mermaid diagram. Most of the time I don't even need to few-shot prompt it with examples. Then you dump the resulting text into something like https://mermaid.live/ and voilà.

I like excalidraw for live discussions but if I want to make more detailed or better looking diagrams, I really enjoy these two tools:

- For drag-and-drop/WYSIWYG, I really like DrawIO. They have a web version https://app.diagrams.net/ but I strongly recommend the desktop version https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop/releases/

- For text-as-diagram, I think Mermaid wins this by default since GitHub added markdown support for these: https://mermaid.live/ (This was github's announcement https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-fil... )

After hours without being able to solve this problem, I decided to make the chart directly in Mermaid's live editor and export it to PNG and SVG. The big problem is that the letters are still too small, the quality of the PNG is very low, and the SVG only works on the web, not with other applications like PowerPoint and Inkscape.

You can export to PNG and other formats in the Mermaid editor https://mermaid.live/

Copy paste code here: https://mermaid.live

While not embedded in markdown, I like d2 [1]. I can use it with org-babel to embed and view the diagrams on emacs. After using graphviz for years, the visual output seems more polished to me. With that said, I want to give pikchr a try.

[1]:https://d2lang.com/

In the next post I'll deep-dive into the D2 language which also has a huge set of features. Stay tuned.

That site is created by the maintainers of D2[1], so it might be biased, but I still think D2 has the friendliest syntax of the bunch, including nomnoml.

[1]: https://d2lang.com/

I've been using https://structurizr.com/ to automatically generate C4 diagrams from a model (rather than drawing them by hand). It works well with the approach for written documentation as proposed in https://arc42.org/. It's very easy to embed a C4 diagram into a markdown document.

The result is a set of documents and diagrams under version control that can be rendered using the structurizr documentation server (for interactive diagrams and indexed search).

I also use https://d2lang.com/ for declarative diagrams in addition to C4, e.g., sequence diagrams and https://adr.github.io/ for architectural decision records. These are also well integrated into structurizr.