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

Understanding Mermaid versions and the Release cycle

In this section, we will talk about Mermaid as a software project, its development model, and finally, how it is periodically bundled and released into specific versions. We will also learn about the semantic versioning scheme and about the release cycle of Mermaid.

Like any other software, Mermaid also has its own life cycle. Mermaid is an open source project that is supported by the open source community. Being open source has its own advantages, the key one being that the entire code base is available for everyone. Any developer can take an in-depth look at the source code, make a personal copy, and alter it as per their needs. Also, if the developer feels that any new feature or functionality added for their own use case might be useful for others, then the developer can actually contribute and share it with the parent project. In this manner, Mermaid gets a lot of new features, functionalities, and bug fixes from a significant...