Graphviz sequence diagram how to#
Graphviz sequence diagram pdf#
Graphviz sequence diagram software#
Graphviz sequence diagram series#

Graphviz sequence diagram pdf#

PlantUML offers a few other export formats, such as PDF (for which you need additional jar files, see here), ASCII art text, or Tikz/LaTeX. Internally, PlantUML uses Graphviz to determine the node layout, but PlantUML does not offer a Graphviz export as dot files (see here). puml extension) to rasterized graphics like png/ jpg, or vector graphics like eps/ svg files. It converts your diagram files (which typically have the. PlantUML is a Java application, packaged as a jar file. You can download the snippets as text here. However, PlantUML can create many other kinds of diagrams, as the following gallery illustrates: Diagrams beyond UMLĪs the name implies, Plant UML may have originally been designed to create UML diagrams. This article provides an understandable introduction, with basic examples. I chose to write this article because the official documentation is somewhat chaotic.

Compared to other markup languages, PlantUML offers the most features, is still actively developed, has a very active forum community and has established a large ecosystem of tools, including real-time preview plug-ins for your favorite IDE. In this article and a follow-up post (which I will release in two weeks) I take a detailed look at PlantUML. In a previous article I discussed several markup languages, such as Pichr, Mermaid and PlantUML, which let you write diagrams as code, as plain text files.

Integrating diagrams into your documentation.

Graphviz sequence diagram series#

With a little experimentation, I found that it works pretty well.įirst, I created a series of UML images in SVG format for inclusion. Looking around the other day, I found a reference to the fact that Graphviz also supports the inclusion of SVG files as an image format. I like using SVG as my format of choice since it can be freely scaled and works in most web browsers these days.

Graphviz sequence diagram software#

Or spend time tweaking the output format (which gets you back into the image software trap)įor a long time graphviz supported the inclusion of PostScript files to define shapes, but this was only useful if you were outputting PostScript as a final result. The output is pretty plain unless you spend a lot of adding style in the dot (which hurts the simplicity of the input format).Sometimes the layout is less than perfect.Supports a wide variety of output formats: bmp, eps, fig, gd, gd2, gif, gtk, ico, imap, cmapx, jpg, pdf, plain, png, ps, svg, tiff, vml, vrml, wbmp, webp, xlib.Need to add something later? No problem, just put it in the dot file and regenerate your results.

Graphviz sequence diagram how to#

You describe the nodes and edges and Graphviz figures out how to handle the layout of the drawing. I like Graphviz for making quick drawings that are minimalistic and take away the tweaking factor of a lot of apps. With any drawing software, the saved file is not human readable - and looking at diffs in a source control system tells you nothing

Omnigraffle on the Mac is arguably better on the usability front, but you still end up tweaking the drawing a lot more than just entering your relationships and drawing connections. Visio is great unless you don’t run on Windows, don’t own a copy, or care about usability.

I’m also not a big fan of a lot of drawing software. Something like MagicDraw I find horrible from a performance and usability perspective. I think it took a simple idea (standard conceptual drawings) and made it much more complex than necessary with the unwise goal of allowing commercial UML tools to flourish and make code-to-diagram round trip conversion something people might want to do.