Diagrams

• Community list of comparisons between Text to Diagram tools
  • Compares Graphviz, D2, Mermaid and PlantUML
  • Made by the makers of D2

Kroki

• Website

Unified API with support for BlockDiag (BlockDiag, SeqDiag, ActDiag, NwDiag, PacketDiag, RackDiag), BPMN, Bytefield, C4 (with PlantUML), D2, DBML, Diagrams.net (experimental), Ditaa, Erd, Excalidraw, GraphViz, Mermaid, Nomnoml, Pikchr, PlantUML, SvgBob, Symbolator, UMLet, Vega, Vega-Lite, WaveDrom and WireViz …and more to come!

• GitHub
• Gitlab integration
  • Only for GitLab Self-Managed and GitLab Dedicated, not for gitlab.com

Ascii diagrams

• venn.nvim Neovim plugin

likec4

• "Architecture-as-a-code with live diagrams"
• Website
• Docs
• Playground

D2

• Website
• D2 Playground
• Native Vim plugin
  • Vim Script
• Obsidian plugin
• Some features are available on the proprietary TALA layout engine, i.e. Directions per container

Mermaid

• Mermaid vs. UML
• Mermaid live editor
• Integrated in gitlab
• Mermaid JS, library
• Mermaid cli
• Scale images
• see examples in ~/projects/diagrams/mermaid

Install

sudo pacman -Q mermaid-cli

Usage

Show which version of mermaid is installed:

```mermaid
info
````

Issues

• How do I force subgraphs to be top-down ?

Use pandoc to create PDF from markdown + mermaid

• Gist: Render PDF from Markdonw that using mermaid
• mermaid-filter

sudo apt install pandoc
npm i -g mermaid-filter

pandoc  -F mermaid-filter -o freifunk.pdf freifunk.md

NeoVim plugin

• Render mermaid diagrams in Neovim with diagram.nvim

Issues:

• Could not configure it to only render on InsertLeavei or BufWinEnter. The example config shows render_buffer = { "InsertLeave", "BufWinEnter", "TextChanged" }, but even when I take out "TextChanged" it renders on every key stroke.
• Even simple diagrams with subgraphs lead to a very high CPU load (load ~30), because dozens of chromium processes spawn
• Unexplained error

UML tools

• Violet UML Editor: Stalled development (2018)

• argo uml: Stalled development (2018)

• Umbrello: Avaiable as ubuntu deb package

• PlantUML: text to diagram, Stalled development (2018), available as .deb

DrawIO

• app.diagrams.net

Server rack / switch documentation

Blockdiag

• Website

• Development stalled

• Blockdiag can be rendered from Krok

• nwdiag
  • generate network-diagram image file from spec-text file
  • included tools: i.e. rackdiag
  • Aur package: nwdiag