I really like plantuml, but I just wish there was a way to give layout hints to the engine.
You can sort of specify the direction of arrows, but since everything is a fluid layout, changing those in bigger diagrams behave very chaotic and unpredictable... I very often I just end up using other manual tools to paint those diagrams.
There are actually a number of layout engine hints available for compact, minimize crossings, hard angles instead of curves, top/down vs left/right, and using hidden lines to force specific relationships.
It's scattered about a bit through the manual, but you can achieve most things you need.
Really, there's a Zen of PlantUML where you stop trying to control it and focus on defining the relationships.
What I would like is way to specify start and end row and column number of nodes. That way it would be more predictable and changing the relations of two nodes does not cause everything to change.
In some diagrams you can use ->, -->, --->, -...-> to specify "ranks" between connections. The layout engine will space accordingly, depending on the top-down or left-right hint.
Yes, especially for statecharts, they get rendered in an ugly manner, totally different from how someone would manually lay them out.
Sequence diagrams come out all right, but I wish if there was some provision to lay diagrams out for automatic page breaks for a4 size paper, for example.
We’ve started to embrace PlantUML in our Systems and Software engineering teams at work.
One nice feature of this markup language is creating diagrams programmatically. We wrote a small python tool that will take a State Transition Table (States cross Events) and create the diagram. I have found it helpful to start from the table to ensure States and Events are well defined and all options are considered, but once that is done the diagram is also quite useful for discussion.
Things that we have found helpful are the MediaWiki plugin and the Word plugin.
We’ve also started adding unique identifiers to all diagrams across our large development program, and keeping all diagrams in one central spot. That alone has been almost as useful as PlantUML.
It is REALLY nothing exciting or novel, sorry to disappoint.
I got tired of finding documents with a figure we needed somewhere else and hunting for 15 minutes for the source material.
We number the figures PRJ-FIG_0001 and have the source files in a top level shared folder (or svn/git). Note it’s important to have the figure id in the figure itself as well as the file name so when it’s imported into a doc the ID is embedded in the figure itself.
I use this often enough but it's rather tedious and the diagrams don't look very polished unfortunately
They suffer from formatting issues and are generally more trouble than anything to grapple with
It's probably best for sequence diagrams but activity diagrams with swim lanes and things are quite a chore to implement in an aesthetically pleasing way
I have followed PlantUML for a long while, but mostly use OmniGraffle to make UML sequence diagrams and occasionally high level class diagrams. I wrote a UML book with Paul Harmon many years ago, but now I only use UML a bit.
I will give PlantUML another try since OmniGraffle is an overkill for the simple diagrams I make now.
I have been using WebSequenceDiagrams [1] for years. Love it. It is declarative and simple, and works really well. The syntax seems similar but not the same as the OP article.
In a readme's or wiki page for an epic/story I often usually use a copy of the diagram image, with a link to edit the text/markup, or the text just in a collapsed wiki element. Though there are now also plugins for Confluence and more I believe.
Reminds me of "https://mermaidjs.github.io/"
I've used mermaid for basic network documentation and simple routing diagrams. And Mermaidjs has a viewer plugin for AtomIDE
Is there any viable alternatives to PlantUML out there?
I want there to exist a simple format that I can put under version control that gives me neat looking diagrams – without requiring me to run a Java based server component.
Monodraw [0] and such are nice, but the diagrams are neither nice nor easy to change without having access to the editor.
I have embraced the blockdiag series of programs, which include seqdiag, actdiag, and nwdiag. There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you learn to customize things well it works very well. There are limitations but I got so fed up with Vizio a few years back I was determined to focus on the kiss principle.
it's amazing that after all these years diagramming on the computer still hasn't got solved. it's like todo lists and calendars. every now and then, there is something new.
Disappointingly, it looks like it doesn't support mathematical diagrams other than via embedded math-specific languages. I continue to want a markup language for hypergraphs, categories, finitely presented monoids, etc.
No. TikZ is only for drawing, but diagrams are proper objects with properties and data, and we should be able to manipulate them, not just display them.
I’ve tried doing this with PlantUML but never got it right. Is there a tool like PlantUML that is specifically for architecture diagrams like the ones above (custom icons, etc)?
Yeah, I do all of these things by hand today as well. It is very time consuming especially when I want to make changes. I’d be willing to accept more constraints if that’s what I have to do but my current attempts with PlantUML can’t get close to the look I’d like even for simple diagrams unfortunately.
I like PlantUML but have been disappointed by the quality of its vector output options (SVG, etc.). I found that things rounded corners tended to be rendered at limited resolution, which becomes apparent if zooming in enough.
SVG doesn't have an intrinsic resolution; that's determined by the rendering device. The SVG could be incorrect, but I don't think you can blame plantuml for your device rendering at inadequate resolution.
Anyway, PlantUML is my go UML tool because it is a markup language that can be version controlled by git.