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hankbond 16 hours ago [-]
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 trying to earn a living, just providing feedback.
jumpalongjim 10 hours ago [-]
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.
bberenberg 7 hours ago [-]
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.
jumpalongjim 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bberenberg 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jumpalongjim 5 hours ago [-]
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.
xdotcommer 6 hours ago [-]
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.
jumpalongjim 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
WalterGR 17 hours ago [-]
Graph layout is a very interesting, very hard problem.
There's even a yearly competition - started in 1994 - whose results are announced at the yearly Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization.
It's not a subject I'm versed in, but can you talk more about your solution? Do you use a larger constraint solver or is it hand-coded?
n.b. It's an independent conference, not under the auspices of e.g. IEEE or ACM.
jumpalongjim 10 hours ago [-]
Neither, really — it's closer to hand-rolled local search.
My first three phases are based on Sugiyama to produce a seed layout (which is broadly what Dagre does). Then I've added my new phases driven by a penalty score that grades candidate layouts using fourteen factors that I devised from my experience laying out graphs manually. The refinement phase is where the bulk of my work is. It applies targeted move types iteratively within a budget, trying to lower the penalty score.
Finally, the result goes through my own embedding and rendering with the theme system on top.
sbarre 17 hours ago [-]
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.
While it's nice and compact, it actually is rougher to grep.
jumpalongjim 10 hours ago [-]
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.
I’ve switched to D2 from mermaid after they removed ELK from the base. Dagre just doesn’t work for me. I wish there were better options.
doublerabbit 17 hours ago [-]
Well, it is. Mermaid.js
Just vibe code a user interface to it.
h2aichat 7 hours ago [-]
Great idea! I will definitely try it with some graphs that could benefit from it.
albert_e 8 hours ago [-]
Tangent
What is the current standard for generating valid BPMN diagrams. Does Mermaid support the level of control needed for formal diagrams of this nature with possible L1/L2/L3 drill down, multiple swimlanes, etc.
romanhotsiy 10 hours ago [-]
It doesn't work with 4 of 5 diagrams from our codebase I tried randomly :(
jumpalongjim 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ryanackley 18 hours ago [-]
Looks cool. Price is pretty steep. Lucid chart is like $16/month.
rdwrrr 13 hours ago [-]
I regret learning mermaid.
The ecosystem is absolutely terrible.
jumpalongjim 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Not trying to throw any shade or dissuade you from trying to earn a living, just providing feedback.
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.
There's even a yearly competition - started in 1994 - whose results are announced at the yearly Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization.
It's not a subject I'm versed in, but can you talk more about your solution? Do you use a larger constraint solver or is it hand-coded?
--
Competition: https://mozart.diei.unipg.it/gdcontest/
The 34th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization, to be held in Ontario, Canada: https://graphdrawing.github.io/gd2026/
n.b. It's an independent conference, not under the auspices of e.g. IEEE or ACM.
My first three phases are based on Sugiyama to produce a seed layout (which is broadly what Dagre does). Then I've added my new phases driven by a penalty score that grades candidate layouts using fourteen factors that I devised from my experience laying out graphs manually. The refinement phase is where the bulk of my work is. It applies targeted move types iteratively within a budget, trying to lower the penalty score.
Finally, the result goes through my own embedding and rendering with the theme system on top.
See docs here: https://mermaid.ai/open-source/config/layouts.html
https://mermaid.ai/live/edit#pako:eNplUlFPwjAQ_ivNPW9EkMHWB4...
You can try it with Line9's first chart: https://mermaid.ai/live/edit#pako:eNpVVEtv2zAM_iuCTilgB1mbxq...
While it's nice and compact, it actually is rougher to grep.
[0]: https://typst.app/universe/package/merman/
It's an amazing tool, but I wish it were open source.
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
Just vibe code a user interface to it.
What is the current standard for generating valid BPMN diagrams. Does Mermaid support the level of control needed for formal diagrams of this nature with possible L1/L2/L3 drill down, multiple swimlanes, etc.