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Comment by nick123567 | Hacker News Reader

Why not learn ppt, keynote or drive slides? More universally applicable and powerful IMO.

  - no diffs
  - no line attributions
  - no easy versioning
  - no discussions about whether something should be pushed 10 px to the right
  - no reshuffling a whole diagram after you've changed something

Very good points and clear benefits. My worries are however, the exact layouting demands when you talk to stakeholders. So maybe not a 10px topic but a layering story, LTR-user-to-database thinking, ...

also:

    - no need to use a shitty office 365 web app (sluggish, slow to load, trusting 10 CDNs)
    - ppt is not a graph tool, have fun moving things around after creating a diagram
    - no need to rely on proprietary software
    - no need to log in anywhere
    - no costs

I know there is also the offline old school office suite, but that is more and more deprecated, as MS pushes for everything being a web app.

Keynote on Mac fixes many of these complaints, I find it great for diagramming where presentation needs to be very crisp.

Agree with others that Mermaid and PlantUML are very useful, but sometimes you need high degrees of visual customization that they don’t give.

> Agree with others that Mermaid and PlantUML are very useful, but sometimes you need high degrees of visual customization that they don’t give.

I agree with that and it is the reason I have not yet adopted using Mermaid more.

Would be nice to have Mermaid output some form of standard XML describing the graph and then being able to edit it with a graph editing tool.

I often use yEd for making diagrams, but it is not free/libre software. Still the most capable graph editor I know. It stores graphs as XML "graphml", which is structured data of course. Now if we could have a standard format for graphs and visual attributes of graphs like graphml (maybe even graphml, if it is an open standard?) to export to, when using Mermaid, that would be awesome.

I would love it if Mermaid or PlantUML could export to Keynote or similar.

Because none of those are as maintainable for engineers as text that can be checked into source control and even in the project itself.

There is https://marp.app/ which does Markdown to PPT.

You can auto-generate mermaid diagrams from data/class relationships/loosely coupled messages etc. and make them interactive: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vue-mermaid

Powerpoint doesn't really cover those things.

If you try to create a non trivial sequence diagram with a slide deck editor you will become aggravated in a couple of minutes. Now repeat the same thing for a couple scenario diagrams more trying to connect arrows here and there and I guarantee you will throw your computer to a wall.

I've made plenty of presentations. It's an extremely cumbersome way to get an idea out, especially in less formal contexts.

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