mermaid VS plantuml

MermaidJS

Another solution which I prefer is - maintaining diagrams as code which live in the same repos as the code. There are many tools these days which help us author diagrams from code. My favorites are Mermaid and PlantUML. Now your code can live in the repo and evolve along with the codebase. You might need to do additional setup if you'd like the diagrams to be generated as part of your CI/CD. I like to maintain these in a /docs folder within the project repo.

Individual diagrams have their grammar in a .jison file.

Flowchart: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/blob/develop/packages/...

A single grammar to support all the different use cases would be challenging. But we did have some plans to introduce guidelines to make different diagram syntaxes more consistent.

This would really be a good UX improvement.

But the implementation might be a little tricky.

Please raise an issue so we can discuss further, and add it to roadmap if feasible.

https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/issues/new

This is so cool. It reminds me of Markdown and Mermaid (https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid), which can do a similar thing within a plain text file. Keep it up; looking forward to trying it out.

KeenWrite[0], the FOSS Markdown text editor I’ve been working on, includes the ability to render plain text diagrams via Kroki[1]†. See the screenshots[2] for examples. Here’s a sample Markdown document that was typeset[3] using ConTeXt[4] (and an early version of the Solare[5] theme).

One reason I developed KeenWrite was to use variables inside of plain text diagrams. In the genealogy diagram, when any character name (that’s within the diagram) is updated, the diagram regenerates automatically. (The variables are defined in an external YAML file, allowing for integration with build pipelines.)

Version 3.x containerizes the typesetting system, which greatly simplifies the installation instructions that allow typesetting Markdown into PDF files. It also opens the door to moving Kroki into the container so that diagram descriptions aren’t pushed over the Internet to be rendered.

†Kroki, ergo KeenWrite, supports BlockDiag (BlockDiag, SeqDiag, ActDiag, NwDiag, PacketDiag, RackDiag), BPMN, Bytefield, C4 (with PlantUML), Ditaa, Erd, Excalidraw, GraphViz, Nomnoml, Pikchr, PlantUML, Structurizr, SvgBob, UMLet, Vega, Vega-Lite, and WaveDrom.

Note that Mermaid diagrams generate non-conforming SVG[6], so they don’t render outside of web browsers. There is work being done to address[7] this problem.

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

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

[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/main/docs/scree...

[3]: https://pdfhost.io/v/4FeAGGasj_SepiSolar_Highlevel_Software_...

[4]: https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page

[5]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/

[6]: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/issues/2485

[7]: https://github.com/yuzutech/kroki/issues/1410

Useful resources: GitHub repository Package size: 24.9 MB License: MIT

Or, this one: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid

I like https://plantuml.com/, because it is text-based and simple, fulfilling my needs in simple diagrams. Plug-ins dir IDEs exist but there is also a web-viewer/editor.

I think it would be much easier to write a parser that generates PlantUML code

I use https://plantuml.com.

I do fancy https://plantuml.com/ in combination with a few yankpad snippets with basic structure/elements to start from.

Another solution which I prefer is - maintaining diagrams as code which live in the same repos as the code. There are many tools these days which help us author diagrams from code. My favorites are Mermaid and PlantUML. Now your code can live in the repo and evolve along with the codebase. You might need to do additional setup if you'd like the diagrams to be generated as part of your CI/CD. I like to maintain these in a /docs folder within the project repo.

PlantUML is a tool that allows you to write diagrams such as sequence, object, component, usecase, class diagrams and more.

I haven’t actually used it yet, but I installed the plantuml plugin in PHPStorm yesterday and tinkered with it a bit. I think it will be a very useful communication tool because I can look at the code while I’m making my diagrams.

I've been using plantUML, a little steep learning curve but when you learn it, it's really good. https://plantuml.com/