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I only use diagramming tools with automatic layout algos to generate visualizations programmatically to debug things. For documentation purpose, I largely prefer to draw them by hand using OmniGraffle, because making graphs look nice using tools like graphviz is very complex and you find yourself abusing features to hack your vision into reality

What's dearly needed in my opinion is a graph layout algo based on a machine learning model (so that it can take into account readability and aesthetics). Unfortunately what I found so far is mostly concerned with displaying large graphs, which is kind of another domain altogether.

I hope Mermaid is collecting every single edition point that happens on their UI, that would make for a nice dataset I guess.

▲ terrastruct 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We make (and sell) one, you can play with it here: https://play.d2lang.com/?script=qlDQtVOo5AIEAAD__w%3D%3D&lay...

Bigger example: https://play.d2lang.com/?script=rJLfavMwDMXv_RR6gYbvo3ce7FWG...

(I don't like to self promo on competitor posts, but since Mermaid doesn't compete in making its own layout engine I felt sharing this under this thread is relevant to HN. If anyone from Mermaid finds it in poor taste just let me know and I'll delete)

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Xmd5a 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I tried TALA and am surprised to learn it embeds a machine learning model. I settled on ELK (very complex and time consuming to get right), before getting interested in constraint based graph layout (mostly for aligning nodes). Symmetry is nice to have too.

In fact what I'm trying to do is generating beautiful flow graph illustrations like this (non-sensical, just to give you a vibe):

https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIG4.sqo88280g1BDb7r2aORg?pid=ImgG...

Tis hard. Graph layout (bites fist). Layout based image diffusion (tears). One day though.

	▲	gregoryw3 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Wondering where the machine learning model comes into play? Googling doesn’t seem to bring me to an article and the terrastruct site doesn’t mention it as far as I can see.

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junto 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is it possible to visualize PlantUML? I tried to paste some but it wasn’t very easy on mobile.

▲ Xmd5a 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also, some interesting links I stumbled upon while exploring this space:

Graphviz-like generic graph-drawing library. More options, more control.

https://eclipse.dev/elk/

Experiments by the same team responsible for the development of ELK, at Kiel University

https://github.com/kieler/KLighD

Kieler project wiki

https://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/confluence/display/KIEL...

Constraint-based graph drawing libraries

https://www.adaptagrams.org/

JS implementation

https://ialab.it.monash.edu/webcola/

Some cool stuff:

HOLA: Human-like Orthogonal Network Layout

https://ialab.it.monash.edu/~dwyer/papers/hola2015.pdf

Confluent Graphs demos: makes edges more readable.

https://www.aviz.fr/~bbach/confluentgraphs/

Stress-Minimizing Orthogonal Layout of Data Flow Diagrams with Ports

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.4626.pdf

Improved Optimal and Approximate Power Graph Compression for Clearer Visualisation of Dense Graphs

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.6996v1.pdf

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bastardoperator 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I settled on excalidraw via obsidian

https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin

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dominicdewalt 9 hours ago | parent [-]

This is really impressive! Excalidraw does some great work. Did you try Mermaid's integration with Obsidian? What was lacking and what ultimately hooked you on Excalidraw?

	▲	bastardoperator 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I do use mermaid quite a bit in markdown because it's documentation/code that can be updated, the idea tends to start in my notes as excalidraw, and eventually become a mermaid graph. I wouldn't say it's lacking anything. I have not tried it so I can't a valid opinion, but I am happy to give it a try and give some feedback. I do waste time converting. I see a couple of tools, do you recommend one in particular?
	▲	Vampiero 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The only reason anyone uses mermaid is because it's low friction and most editors support it out of the box or through plugins. But its layouting engine sucks and everything requires hacks and workarounds and configuration tweaks to display properly. Only the most trivial graphs render nicely on the first try. All I really want to do is define how to actually lay out the blocks using a DSL so that they don't look like absolute shit. I hate drag and drop UIs and I hate mermaid. There's no decent code-first diagram building tool out there, let alone one that I can embed into my notes as easily as mermaid.

▲ dominicdewalt 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hi! I'm Dominic from the Mermaid product team. You raise some good points here. We released the whiteboard to help users get an exact layout they'd like, but it's in its early stages and is undergoing a lot of improvements.

I understand that automatic layout algos is one of the big draws of Mermaid since it creates a lot of speed, but our current layouts can get a little convoluted. I like your idea on creating a machine learning model, but I'm curious what your biggest pain points are or if you have any basic requirements for a readable and aesthetic diagram. Is it made with hard corners on edges? Rounded?

Would love to hear any thoughts you might have on this! You can email me at dominic@mermaidchart.com if you'd be willing to share. Thanks for your comment!

▲ dr_kiszonka 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have been using the beta and would certainly appreciate a few more layouts. You can have a look at yEd for inspiration. Otherwise, it looks very promising!

▲ Xmd5a 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the main reason why diagrams are not used as often as they should to document code bases is that we developers have to face opposite yet complementary approaches: text based graph specifications (but then the layout's quality doesn't scale with graph size), or GUI based approaches that lead to way better results but are too costly to maintain.

The idea of using machine learning is just a kind of knee jerk reaction to this fact. Maybe we could just throw graphs at a graph neural network and have the model learn all the features we are interested in without listing them explicitly (let alone the rules to decide which to prioritize). It's more an art than a science, really.

Among those listed in these papers[1][2] those I am the the most interesting in, beyond the usual overlap minimization, edge crossing and edge length reduction are the following:

    symmetry/alignment
    hierarchical layouts (subgraphs within nodes)
    Fine-grained control of flow direction (doesn't have to be the same in each subgraph)

Those are the features that have constrained the most my search for a diagram engine. Aesthetics (I mean readability) is paramount to using diagrams as documentation IMO. They are not just graphs, they are mental palaces.

A palace's layout must not change if you decide to build an extension. Stability isn't guaranteed with most graph layout algos: add a node and you might end up with a graph that doesn't look like the previous version. Nodes shifts, edges move around. Confusing. There has been research in this direction[3], namely "interactive graph layout". It forces us to move away from a stateless approach to graph generation (graph specification -> picture) and into a stateful paradigm where the previous state of the layout will be preserved to some extent in the new version. With the layout specified as a mixture of previous layout state + constraints I could picture a pipeline where an LLM watches the commit log of some git repo and updates diagrams via semantic reasoning automatically with a 90% success rate, while the remaining 10% is left to the developer to fix.

And there is also "UI-bility". A high degree of customization, being able to plug your own (react,vue,whatever) components into a graph can turn it into a monitoring tool. I wrote an (incomplete) debugger for a go-style channel framework that displays interactions as sequential diagrams, and, although neither D2 nor PlantUML offer this, I had to give up on using the former because it did not provide on-hover tool-tips, which was critical for my use case.

[1] https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/16689/1/survey_graph...

[2] in particular chapter 6, https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:4f196k...

[3] https://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~biblio/downloads/paper...

	▲	billyp-rva 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Re: mental palaces and interactive diagrams, what is your take on Ilograph?