jumpalongjim

I’m out and about so haven’t tried this yet, but sounds like your context is an embedded diagram. For free diagrams (.mmd files) I find AI creation and editing to be highly effective.

I recognise your point entirely and I will have to take it onboard for the future of my business. Please do, however, make good use of the website which is completely free, private, needs no signup, and gives you export to SVG and PNG. Also let me know if there’s anything else that would make it more usable. Many thanks.

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.

Delighted that you saw improvements.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recipe websites are about the worst in packing adverts and junk around their recipes, so this is brilliant. But I think you're having difficulty in listing available recipes from the search, some sites not playing ball. But you don't give a list of options to pick from, which might be helpful.

I like this. I have manually operated blinds and the automated kits were expensive, but not more than about £60 each from memory. Anyway I've occasionally thought of doing something like this. I did something simple for my bedroom curtains 45 years ago.

Yours seems well integrated but does seem quite noisy.