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.
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.
I think the main thing people paid for was avoidance of change. Devs already use mermaid (by preference or policy) and therefore they wanted to keep using it. When I first build the Markdown Macro in 2012/2013 my thesis was that people would want to keep using Markdown in place of WYSIWIG, and that there was value to having a file in git be a source of truth and updating it there would keep Confluence automatically updated thereby reducing work to keep docs accurate. The first half proved true for devs, the second half did not, the stats showed that almost everyone would paste the markdown source into the in Confluence editor. When we added Mermaid, we saw more of the same. I am not sure how much I can say without violating NDAs, but I would encourage anyone working in this space to work to understand the ratio between how often content is authored vs consumed and by whom in each category. The idea that 1% of people author the content for 99% of consumers that we see on the internet does not translate to corporate environments and this has important product implications.
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…
For sure, I was not implying ELK was a replacement, it's just been good to me for some types of flowcharts that get messy with the standard Dagre layout ...
Excellent work on Line9 BTW, it looks fantastic. :-)
This solves my biggest gripe with Mermaid. It's an amazing tool, but I wish it were open source.
Is this not open source enough for your purposes? https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-live-editor https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli OP's product is not open source btw
Yeah sorry, I should have clarified that I wish OP's product was open source. mb
I have my own flowchart layout code for a video processing application I wrote. But it is mainly to get everything on the page and connected, not to look nice. There is a visual editor for that. But something like this could be useful to me to improve that intial layout. I'll have to look into converting the flow diagram to Mermaid. From what I've seen of Mermaid that is probably not difficult. But I had AI building the Mermaid code in that case. Good work.
I have my own flowchart layout code for a video processing application I wrote. But it is mainly to get everything on the page and connected, not to look nice. There is a visual editor for that. But something like this could be useful to me to improve that intial layout. I'll have to look into converting the flow diagram to Mermaid. From what I've seen of Mermaid that is probably not difficult. But I had AI building…
Right. Mermaid syntax for basic flowcharting is straightforward. But it's even easier to get your AI to produce Mermaid, which they do very readily. May I suggest you try the Line9 CLI, which lets your AI show you the diagram visually as soon as it's created.
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.
Oh I'm not saying I don't want it. If the company would pay for it I certainly would use it. Just yesterday I was dealing with overlapping edge labels and at a loss for how I would futz my way to fix it since I did not want to push the nodes around.
It's just that they will pay whatever I want to use in tokens with no questions, but if I ask for a simple time saver like this it has to go through a whole purchasing lifecycle with layers of approvals.