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

Technical requirements

In this chapter, we will be looking at some examples, for which we need to have some prerequisites. In order to run most of the examples, we will need a JavaScript interpreter called Node.js, which runs from the command line. It needs to be installed on your machine. If you do not already have Node.js installed, you can download it from https://nodejs.org/en/. This page contains the installation options for your system and the appropriate instructions.

Another option would be to use a node version manager, which would make the process of switching to a different version of Node.js much easier. One example of such a node version manager is NVM, which can be found here: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm.

Apart from these, some sections may require that you have rudimentary knowledge of HTML, including what an element is, what CSS is, and more. You will need to have a basic understanding of HTML as it will make this chapter easier for you to follow.

Advanced...