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

Creating a Gantt Chart with Mermaid

In this section, you will learn about Gantt charts and their various components, and how to define them in Mermaid. You will learn the syntax of defining a section and its task in Mermaid. You will learn how to set the title for a Gantt chart. You will know about excluding non-working days that should be skipped and this is reflected in the planning schedule in a Gantt chart.

One of the biggest advantages of using Mermaid to create Gantt charts, for you as an author, is that you do not have to worry about the positioning of an individual task or activity or calculating the timeline along the axis while rendering the diagram, as Mermaid takes care of this. So, you just need to provide the Gantt chart data using code, and Mermaid will render a nice-looking diagram for you based on your input. Now, let's first understand what a Gantt chart looks like and try to understand its different components. After that, we will have a closer look at the...