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vunderba

Mermaid Pros

- Can be embedded as code blocks in straight markdown notes (and many markdown editors support rendering)

- Since it's not a graphic, it's text searchable

Mermaid Cons

- if you don't like the way the diagram is visually laid out there's not really an easy way to change it

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Agree but we are changing things up to make this easier.

In the upcoming Mermaid version 11, we are adding a way to select which layout algorithm is used to layout the diagram. We are also making it easier to add additional layout algorithms.

Hopefully, this will be easier going forward!

Will it be possible to manually position the nodes? Ideally, manually position some nodes and auto-layout the rest.

This discussion reminds me a lot of graphviz. Similar issues and (IIRC) proposed solutions.

Mermaid could do well to learn from Graphviz. It’s much older and a lot of thought has been put into rendering. It’s the most powerful graph rendering engine that I’m aware of and for anything more than a little complex it’s really the only option to produce something even readable.

Nice! Can't wait to try it

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