mermaid problems

Yesterday, I had to work with mermaid for the first time. I noticed error messages coming from the plugin saying, that no mermaid executable is installed.

Failed to generate image: Could not find the 'mermaid' executable in PATH; 
add it to the PATH or specify its location using the 'mermaid' document attribute

So I searched for a way to install it and found out that I need to install npm first.

npm install -g mermaid.cli

After I installed it, the plugin was broken in such a way that the preview pane only displays “initializing…” and never changes to the preview.

AsciiDoc Example for rendering mermaid:

a test

[mermaid]
----
graph TD
A[Christmas] -->|Get money| B(Go shopping)
B --> C{Let me think}
C -->|One| D[Laptop]
C -->|Two| E[iPhone]
C -->|Three| F[Car]
----

AsciiDoc Plugin Version: 0.30.86

IDE Name and Version:

IntelliJ IDEA 2020.1.4 (Ultimate Edition)
Build #IU-201.8743.12, built on July 21, 2020
Runtime version: 11.0.7+10-b765.65 amd64
VM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM by JetBrains s.r.o.
Windows 10 10.0

Update: after quite a while the diagram was rendered. I tried to modify it but It didn’t re-render. Instead, I got the following error message in the Event Log:

Error during rendering scratch_13.adoc
	uri:classloader:/gems/asciidoctor-diagram-2.0.2/lib/asciidoctor-diagram/util/cli_generator.rb:50: warning: Tempfile#unlink or delete called on open file; ignoring

[ari]

Never mind. I’ve moved over to PlantUML and although there was more work to set up nice styling, it has a lot more flexibility and the integration is easier.

[ahus1]

I gave mermaid a try. I found that after installing mermaid (like you did), the IDE preview behaved strangely:

• mermaid CLI starts node, that then starts an (old) version of chromium to render the preview
• an invalid diagram (while typing contents) seemed to stall the mermaid rendering
• I was able to unblock the preview by killing the node process
• even when rendering valid diagrams the preview is quite slow

The preview might be more interactive if the mermaid would use just JavaScript in the preview (like MathJax). This way it would be interruptable when a timeout occurs, and wouldn’t need to start so many processes in the background.

Someone would need to give it a try to see if it is possible.

I’d like to see some votes/comments on this to find out if there is demand for this.