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

Setting configuration options using initialize

So far, we have learned about how directives are used by diagram authors to modify configurations when they're writing diagrams. This changes the configuration for individual diagrams. Now, we will look at how to update the default configuration that Mermaid uses for all diagrams on a website.

If we take a step back and look at the configuration handling that's available in Mermaid, we will see that it has three levels. Understanding these levels makes integrating Mermaid with a website or any other system/tool much easier. These three levels of configuration are as follows:

  • The default configuration: This is a set of configuration values that will produce nice diagrams in most situations. There is generally no need to change the default configuration.
  • The site configuration: This is Mermaid's default configuration, but with a set of site-specific updates applied to it. The site integrator – the person...