Book Image

The Official Guide to Mermaid.js

By : Knut Sveidqvist, Ashish Jain
Book Image

The Official Guide to Mermaid.js

By: Knut Sveidqvist, Ashish Jain

Overview of this book

Mermaid is a JavaScript-based charting and diagramming tool that lets you represent diagrams using text and code, which simplifies the maintenance of complex diagrams. This is a great option for developers as they’re more familiar with code, rather than using special tools for generating diagrams. Besides, diagrams in code simplify maintenance and ensure that the code is supported by version control systems. In some cases, Mermaid makes refactoring support for name changes possible while also enabling team collaboration for review distribution and updates. Developers working with any system will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide to using Mermaid for documentation. The book is also a great reference for looking up the syntax for specific diagrams when authoring diagrams. You’ll start by learning the importance of accurate and visual documentation. Next, the book introduces Mermaid and establishes how to use it to create effective documentation. By using different tools, editors, or a custom documentation platform, you’ll also understand how to use Mermaid syntax for various diagrams. Later chapters cover advanced configuration settings and theme options to manipulate your diagram as per your needs. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with Mermaid diagrams and how they can be used in your workflows.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Mermaid
7
Section 2: The Most Popular Diagrams
12
Section 3: Powerful Diagrams for the Advanced User

Rendering Pie Charts

In this section, you will learn about pie charts and how to render them with Mermaid. Pie charts are one of the easiest types of Mermaid diagrams to learn. As the name suggests, they help to illustrate a set of numerical data in the form of a pie. The proportion of the data representing one specific type covers a part of the pie, resembling a slice, such that by adding all these slices together, you get the whole pie. These slices are also called sections or arcs of a pie chart. The relative size of the section is calculated by Mermaid, which automatically converts the numerical data into percentages as section labels in a pie chart.

Let's look at an example of a pie chart:

Figure 9.1  – Pie chart diagram in Mermaid

Figure 9.1 – Pie chart diagram in Mermaid

This circular chart has been used for a long time to visualize the comparative numerical size of different types in a given dataset. Mermaid lets you create a pie chart by just supplying a dataset and then...