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

Summary

That is all for this chapter. You learned how to use themes to change the appearance of the diagrams rendered by Mermaid. You learned how to change the configuration in order to set a theme both on a site-wide level using the initialize method and for individual diagrams using directives. You proceeded into theming and learned how to create a reusable custom theme using the built-in dynamic theming engine in Mermaid. There, you learned that the theming engine uses a number of color variables to generate a theme and how said variables affect the diagrams. Finally, you gained an insight into how to evaluate a custom theme in a simple way, using showcase diagrams.

Now after having learned so much about how to set themes and configuration options for Mermaid, it's finally time for you to start drawing diagrams. In the next chapter, we will start by looking at flowcharts, which are one of the most commonly used diagram types in the world.