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

Theming

If you, for some reason, find some detail of how the state diagrams look unpleasing but do not wish to change the theme for all the other diagrams, then this is the section for you. In this section, we will describe how to change the colors of the theme in such a way that it only affects the state diagrams.

In the following subsections, we will cover how you can change the theme of sequence diagrams in different ways without affecting the other diagrams. This is done by changing theme variables specifically for state diagrams. We will cover each variable and show how it affects the output.

In some of the following examples, a web page with a dark background color has been used. The reason for this is to highlight the changes brought by the theme variables. The dark background in the examples makes sure that the changes are visually different from the default values without using colors. When you try these examples on your own, it will probably be more convenient to select...