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Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

line9.ai

21–30 of 41 posts

Re: Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

#21
post #8

FYI for any new or casual Mermaid users, it comes with a built-in alternate layout called `elk` that I find does a much cleaner job on complex flowcharts. See docs here: https://mermaid.ai/open-source/config/layouts.html

Mermaid does indeed provide alternative layout engines. Please do try ELK before Line9. My experience is 1) hand-tuning the layout of Mermaid, having to try alternative engines or parameters, is not what I want. I just want a graph that I can use straight away. 2) ELK more often than not does give a clearer flowchart that I might be satisfied with for personal use but I still wasn't happy putting it in a presentation in front of others.

Re: Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

#22
post #9

I have a bunch of bad layouts so I'll give it a shot, but there's no way my org would pay 120 a year per seat for this. I don't think for any price it would get through procurement to be honest. Also we mostly render mermaid in confluence documents with a macro that renders it from the source in the document. Not sure how that would relate to this pricing/auth model. Not trying to throw any shade or dissuade you from…

Thanks. I haven't yet got to looking into Confluence. I used to use a Confluence plugin for Lucid charts and I guess something like that for Line9 would be useful if it gets much traction. I don't know whether the embedding options in the Pro account would display well in Confluence.

On pricing, I'm testing numbers at the moment so your feedback is valuable. Anyway, please do paste in your bad layouts - I'd love to hear what happens.

Re: Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

#23

It doesn't work with 4 of 5 diagrams from our codebase I tried randomly :(

Oh dear, sorry that didn't work out well for you. If you’re pasting flowcharts that don’t work then I really want to try to address them. Can you say what happened? Nothing rendered at all, or something you couldn’t use? If you’re able to send them to me directly they’re worth a lot as real diagrams to improve Line9 from.

Re: Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

#26
post #9

I have a bunch of bad layouts so I'll give it a shot, but there's no way my org would pay 120 a year per seat for this. I don't think for any price it would get through procurement to be honest. Also we mostly render mermaid in confluence documents with a macro that renders it from the source in the document. Not sure how that would relate to this pricing/auth model. Not trying to throw any shade or dissuade you from…

Thanks. I haven't yet got to looking into Confluence. I used to use a Confluence plugin for Lucid charts and I guess something like that for Line9 would be useful if it gets much traction. I don't know whether the embedding options in the Pro account would display well in Confluence. On pricing, I'm testing numbers at the moment so your feedback is valuable. Anyway, please do paste in your bad layouts - I'd love to h…

I’m the author of one of the most popular mermaid renderers in Confluence. People spent huge sums of money on this. Feel free to message me if you have questions about the space.

Re: Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

#27
post #16

I regret learning mermaid. The ecosystem is absolutely terrible.

I'd separate Mermaid the language from the tooling around it. The language has real strengths, like Markdown for diagrams, and not least in being ubiquitous so that both humans and AIs can use it easily. What I found poor was the tooling side and that's what prompted me to create a new layout engine. The ecosystem can be improved.

Re: Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

#28
post #9

I have a bunch of bad layouts so I'll give it a shot, but there's no way my org would pay 120 a year per seat for this. I don't think for any price it would get through procurement to be honest. Also we mostly render mermaid in confluence documents with a macro that renders it from the source in the document. Not sure how that would relate to this pricing/auth model. Not trying to throw any shade or dissuade you from…

I dunno... This may not be for everyone but if I consider the amount of time spent correcting diagrams in excalidraw $10 / month seems more than reasonable to me: as long as it's for the creator not the viewer.

Re: Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

#29
post #9

I have a bunch of bad layouts so I'll give it a shot, but there's no way my org would pay 120 a year per seat for this. I don't think for any price it would get through procurement to be honest. Also we mostly render mermaid in confluence documents with a macro that renders it from the source in the document. Not sure how that would relate to this pricing/auth model. Not trying to throw any shade or dissuade you from…

Thanks. I haven't yet got to looking into Confluence. I used to use a Confluence plugin for Lucid charts and I guess something like that for Line9 would be useful if it gets much traction. I don't know whether the embedding options in the Pro account would display well in Confluence. On pricing, I'm testing numbers at the moment so your feedback is valuable. Anyway, please do paste in your bad layouts - I'd love to h…

Ok, I've investigated Confluence some more. Publishing a diagram from Line9 Pro gives you a stable URL that serves a pre-rendered SVG and which updates when you modify the Mermaid. This can easily be displayed in Confluence by inserting an image from a link. Problems I found: 1) you'd need to published with public visibility 2) Confluence appears to cache the image, so updates don't appear in the page. Doing this properly in Confluence will need an app, which I don't have yet.

Re: Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I haven't yet got to looking into Confluence. I used to use a Confluence plugin for Lucid charts and I guess something like that for Line9 would be useful if it gets much traction. I don't know whether the embedding options in the Pro account would display well in Confluence. On pricing, I'm testing numbers at the moment so your feedback is valuable. Anyway, please do paste in your bad layouts - I'd love to h…

I’m the author of one of the most popular mermaid renderers in Confluence. People spent huge sums of money on this. Feel free to message me if you have questions about the space.

Thanks, very kind offer. When people paid real money for this, were they paying to make diagrams look good, or for convenient source-editing and rendering in the page? Line9 is built around the first and doesn't have an ideal solution for the second yet.
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