planter VS echosvg

Here's three interesting Rust projects that use plantuml

You can embed plantuml and drawio diagrams in Rust doc comments and have it rendered in the docs, using this crate

https://crates.io/crates/rsdoc

And you can generate plantuml from SQL tables using

https://crates.io/crates/sqlant (this one is a rust port of a go tool, https://github.com/achiku/planter)

And you can embed plantuml in mdbook

https://crates.io/crates/mdbook-plantuml

You also have PlantUML. There exists an SQL generator for MySQL - not tested - and this utility for generating PlantUML ERD from PostgreSQL tables. This tool is more focussed on communication and allows you to draw large diagrams. However, you loose the sync between the diagram and the code base. You have the official PlantUML on-line drawer.

I use Plant UML in combination with planter [1] to auto-generate a DB schema during CI runs.

Recently I see a lot general statements on HN like "UML is dead" which I think is not the case. Especially in complex, data-heavy projects it's a great way to visualize how things work -- if kept up-to-date and precise.

[1] https://github.com/achiku/planter

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

There's a discussion item about the reason for the fork.

EchoSVG is a library for handling Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) images for various purposes, such as viewing, generation, or manipulation. By leveraging CSS4J, the library supports level 4 CSS selectors and RGBA color values (colors with alpha channel). To my knowledge, there are no other cross-platform, FOSS libraries that can correctly render MermaidJS diagrams outside of a web browser. I've tried Apache Batik, svgSalamander, resvg, rsvg-convert, svglib, CairoSVG, ConTeXt, and QtSVG.