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From: wayne+blog@waynewerner.com
To: everyone.everywhere.all.at.once
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:21:24 -0500
Subject: Mermaid, the Markdown Graphing Tool

Do you like Mermaids? Or just graphs?

Mermaid, the Markdown Graphing Tool

graph LR
    A[Hello] --> World
    World --> A

This might seem ridiculous, and it probably is!

I have recently been introduced to https://mermaid.js.org/ and it happily takes something like

 ```mermaid

 graph TD
    Top --> Bottom
    Left --> Right
    Right --> Top
    Left --> Bottom

```

And turns it into this:

graph TD
       Top --> Bottom
       Left --> Right
       Right --> Top
       Left --> Bottom

The neat thing about it is that because it's Javascript, it's not actually changing the graph itself at all. This rendering is just taking place (or not) on your computer. You could choose to render the graph in some other way, even writing some command line ascii tool to do the same thing!

But, if you need something to produce some graphs, it's not a bad way to go. And it has a whole lot of other power that this doesn't even touch, I'm legit just making this a very simple introduction.

Go check out https://mermaid.js.org/ for more, if you want!

~Wayne
^C

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