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Comment by oftenwrong | Hacker News Reader

I have started using mermaid to create flowcharts. It lets me break free from having to think about layout entirely. Plus, I can use my favourite text editor.

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

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I really like mermaid but I have found larger flow charts often make odd rendering decisions (especially with sub graphs). Otherwise it’s incredible.

Graph layout is extremely complex and there is no good automated way to do it yet (or ever). Even specialized software like plantuml, cytoscape or gephi (depending on the kind you want to do) struggle on some graphs that a human can layout decently well by hand.

Coming from the computer networking space this is somewhere I've been hoping to see a big machine learning splash like language translation has seen since large network graphs are either a big ball of mess or out of date because it takes too much human time to keep up to date.

It seems no matter how complicated you make the layout heuristics or what kind of dynamic iterating system you use when it comes to large connected graphs they just look nothing like a human would make. I'm not sure how would would get a large enough quality training set but it just feels like something that could be better done by machine learning than further manual definition.

The tool from TFA also breaks the user free from thinking about layout entirely, and can export to Mermaid. It's a pretty fancy-looking way to _quickly create_ a graph that I plan to try instead of manually typing Mermaid syntax next time I need to make one.

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