Mermaidjs: create diagrams and flowcharts from text | Hacker News Reader

Mermaidjs: create diagrams and flowcharts from text

mermaidjs.github.io

43 pointsgnur16 comments

We did this 3 months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16889181

I was just doing some diagrams last night. And my wife told me:"Why don't you make a program that makes them?" and I just thought: "She has no idea how hard that would be".

Awesome work!

I still don't understand why you would write this instead of a Graphviz renderer.

  The future is already here — it's just not
  very evenly distributed. -- William Gibson

Everyone doesn't know about Graphviz. It's older than some HN'ers. So old that it comes from the glory days of Bell Labs. Graphviz. http://viz-js.com/

Viz.js is a port of Graphviz for browsers, http://viz-js.com/

Just tried using this for a project last week. Whatever algorithm it uses for positioning nodes is terrible. You end up with a huge confusing spaghetti mess of a diagram.

The good thing about open source is that you can improve on it for the good of all :)

I had the same problem until I realized that the order matters very much. You may want to try to move the code around a bit and see if the result is improved.

Looks nice and I am just looking for a replacement for plantUML.

The syntax looks very similar and I wonder whether it is a superset of plantUML format. That would actually be great.

DiagrammeR uses Mermaid to do flowcharts in R. I used it to do the gantts for a project I'm running last week!

Thanks for the recommendation. Link for the lazy: http://rich-iannone.github.io/DiagrammeR/

It would be really cool if you could have mermaid/graphviz blocks in your R-notebook.

can i use this using a cli ? I'm not able to find the documentation for this for using it through the nodejs cli.

Edit. - found this https://github.com/mermaidjs/mermaid.cli

Why not just use tikz / LaTeX?

I am not going to draw hyperbola, math equations or whatever that is. I don't want to spend next week configuring LaTeX. I just want to plug in some js library and have Gantt/Flow/Sequence diagram, which I don't want to draw by hand or save in some binary format but want to put it in GIT repo.

I tried LaTeX twice it just does not work on Windows, and I don't really need it that much. I have no time to find out why it does not work out of the box for me. Just like dropbox, I install app and it syncs my files, setting VPS with Rsync could work but I do not have time to troubleshoot it in case something is not working.

Because latex might be a tad too heavy (and complex). Also, having a choice is good.

One does not simply use tikz / LaTeX.

Is there any way to make diagrams render in a github readme?

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