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

Documentation with Markdown

So far, we have learned about the importance of documentation, as well as the best practices involved in achieving efficient documentation. One of the suggestions was to move toward text-based documentation that uses Markdown as a formatting style. In this section, we will introduce Markdown, discuss why it is so popular, and go through a quick crash course on the different Markdown elements and how to use them.

What is Markdown?

We briefly touched base on Markdown in Chapter 1, The Art of Documentation with Mermaid, and learned that it is a lightweight markup language. In simple terms, you can say that it is a language syntax that lets you specify the style and formatting of your text. The styling will show up once it has been rendered by the browser. Today, it is one of the most popular markup languages in the world, and the reason for that is because it's super easy to learn and use.

Basically, Markdown syntax is plain text with some simple...