[fbrchps]

The whole point of Mermaid is _not_ having to embed .png's into your Markdown files.

By using the built-in codeblocks functionality of Markdown, Mermaid allows you to source-control the same exact graphs that you would have normally put in as images.

[rout39574]

At the cost of constraining the rendering environment, do I get that right?

So the desire "Turn this generated graph into a diagram for inclusion in this PDF report" would be deemed a category error: my desire is wrong.

It clearly makes some folks happy, but to me it's the antithesis of a "tool"; it's more a "website feature". Different strokes.

[Jiocus]

I write my .pdfs in a stand-alone markdown editor which supports mermaid, so your use-case is what I experience when doing graphs in writing.

This way, there's no need to separately generate an image output to include into the document later on.

Different "tools".

That said, I'd love a dedicated application for diagraming, with exports to various formats for other use-cases.

[gertlex]

That was a piece of information I missed, then! Definitely a nice usecase to keep in mind.

For me, I'm often either (1) sharing diagrams outside of github (e.g. email), as well as (2) generating a bunch of diagrams based on code or whatever, rather than defining a diagram in a markdown file. There may be better tools for those usecases. Those were what I was trying to do last weekend, too.

But I've definitely passed on adding diagrams to my .md files, or sighed at needing to add yet another imgs/ dir and files to a repo folder. My toolbelt now has another thing hanging off it!