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If it saves you at least 15 minutes a month then it sounds like a bargain.

Dumb question if i may, but what is the time saving with "an alternate layout engine"? Ie i don't even know what a layout engine is in this context, and how it would save me time over FOSS versions like mermaid.

I'm tempted to give it a shot, but i don't get what the paid version would actually net me. I'm toying with the Playground now, and in many (most?) cases the TALA version (which i think is the paid version?) seems identical to the Dagre version (Mermaid, i think?)

I'm also having difficulty finding where i'd even buy it. Hmm

edit: Ah https://terrastruct.com/tala/ might have some of my answers

It's not really time-saving. It's aesthetics, how much you care about the beauty and professionalism of your diagrams. All the layout engines will get the correctness right -- all the connections point to where you want em, etc. But they'll often do so in different ways.

Eg: https://text-to-diagram.com/?example=chess&b=d2&layout_b=dag...

Which one of those is the proprietary layout engine? Both dropdowns just show "D2" for me.

Click on the gear icon to choose between TALA, Dagre, and ELK

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