Pele – Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG

6 hours ago (pele.run)

Anytime I try mermaid for anything more complex than a toy diagram I always end up absolutely frustrated by the arcane and topologically poor layout that is produced.

Styling seems like a trivial problem by comparison.

Does the official Mermaid library still require a full or headless browser environment in order to lay out the SVG? If so, Pele is great news for embedding Mermaid rendering in other places.

  • The python mermaidx library works for this, which works well for generating documentation with embedded diagrams as part of CI/CD but the layout/rendering can sometimes be very wonky. For instance I will have a bunch of connections crossing over each other instead of neatly arranged to avoid it. Changing the layout settings does not fix it so sometimes I will just export it from mmdc and embed a png.