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

Styling and Theming

This is the last section of this chapter, but not the least important one. Mermaid lets you choose a theme from a set of pre-defined theme options such as default, base, forest, dark, and neutral. These themes have their own set of colors that are applied to a Gantt chart, so users can get the same diagram to render in different colors simply by changing the selected theme. To learn more about changing the theme and theme variables, you can refer to Chapter 5, Changing Themes and Making Mermaid Look Good.

In this section, you will learn how to add custom CSS styles to override the default colors and styles added by the selected theme in a diagram. We will also focus on the Gantt chart-specific theme variables that can be overridden to give a different look to our overall diagram. These are advanced features, and the best way of experimenting with these functionalities is to use Mermaid integrated withan HTML page. You could use a similar setup to the one you...