4 ms·

I have a bunch of bad layouts so I'll give it a shot, but there's no way my org would pay 120 a year per seat for this. I don't think for any price it would ge

I have a bunch of bad layouts so I'll give it a shot, but there's no way my org would pay 120 a year per seat for this. I don't think for any price it would get through procurement to be honest. Also we mostly render mermaid in confluence documents with a macro that renders it from the source in the document. Not sure how that would relate to this pricing/auth model. Not trying to throw any shade or dissuade you from trying to earn a living, just providing feedback.

jumpalongjim 2mo ago
Thanks. I haven't yet got to looking into Confluence. I used to use a Confluence plugin for Lucid charts and I guess something like that for Line9 would be useful if it gets much traction. I don't know whether the embedding options in the Pro account would display well in Confluence. On pricing, I'm testing numbers at the moment so your feedback is valuable. Anyway, please do paste in your bad layouts - I'd love to hear what happens.
- bberenberg 2mo ago
  I’m the author of one of the most popular mermaid renderers in Confluence. People spent huge sums of money on this. Feel free to message me if you have questions about the space.
  - jumpalongjim 2mo ago
    Thanks, very kind offer. When people paid real money for this, were they paying to make diagrams look good, or for convenient source-editing and rendering in the page? Line9 is built around the first and doesn't have an ideal solution for the second yet.
    - bberenberg 2mo ago
      I think the main thing people paid for was avoidance of change. Devs already use mermaid (by preference or policy) and therefore they wanted to keep using it. When I first build the Markdown Macro in 2012/2013 my thesis was that people would want to keep using Markdown in place of WYSIWIG, and that there was value to having a file in git be a source of truth and updating it there would keep Confluence automatically updated thereby reducing work to keep docs accurate. The first half proved true for devs, the second half did not, the stats showed that almost everyone would paste the markdown source into the in Confluence editor. When we added Mermaid, we saw more of the same. I am not sure how much I can say without violating NDAs, but I would encourage anyone working in this space to work to understand the ratio between how often content is authored vs consumed and by whom in each category. The idea that 1% of people author the content for 99% of consumers that we see on the internet does not translate to corporate environments and this has important product implications.
- jumpalongjim 2mo ago
  Ok, I've investigated Confluence some more. Publishing a diagram from Line9 Pro gives you a stable URL that serves a pre-rendered SVG and which updates when you modify the Mermaid. This can easily be displayed in Confluence by inserting an image from a link. Problems I found: 1) you'd need to published with public visibility 2) Confluence appears to cache the image, so updates don't appear in the page. Doing this properly in Confluence will need an app, which I don't have yet.
xdotcommer 2mo ago
I dunno... This may not be for everyone but if I consider the amount of time spent correcting diagrams in excalidraw $10 / month seems more than reasonable to me: as long as it's for the creator not the viewer.
- jumpalongjim 2mo ago
  [dead]
- hankbond 2mo ago
  Oh I'm not saying I don't want it. If the company would pay for it I certainly would use it. Just yesterday I was dealing with overlapping edge labels and at a loss for how I would futz my way to fix it since I did not want to push the nodes around. It's just that they will pay whatever I want to use in tokens with no questions, but if I ask for a simple time saver like this it has to go through a whole purchasing lifecycle with layers of approvals.
  - jumpalongjim 2mo ago
    I recognise your point entirely and I will have to take it onboard for the future of my business. Please do, however, make good use of the website which is completely free, private, needs no signup, and gives you export to SVG and PNG. Also let me know if there’s anything else that would make it more usable. Many thanks.

jumpalongjim 2mo ago

Thanks. I haven't yet got to looking into Confluence. I used to use a Confluence plugin for Lucid charts and I guess something like that for Line9 would be useful if it gets much traction. I don't know whether the embedding options in the Pro account would display well in Confluence. On pricing, I'm testing numbers at the moment so your feedback is valuable. Anyway, please do paste in your bad layouts - I'd love to hear what happens.

bberenberg 2mo ago
I’m the author of one of the most popular mermaid renderers in Confluence. People spent huge sums of money on this. Feel free to message me if you have questions about the space.
- jumpalongjim 2mo ago
  Thanks, very kind offer. When people paid real money for this, were they paying to make diagrams look good, or for convenient source-editing and rendering in the page? Line9 is built around the first and doesn't have an ideal solution for the second yet.
  - bberenberg 2mo ago
    I think the main thing people paid for was avoidance of change. Devs already use mermaid (by preference or policy) and therefore they wanted to keep using it. When I first build the Markdown Macro in 2012/2013 my thesis was that people would want to keep using Markdown in place of WYSIWIG, and that there was value to having a file in git be a source of truth and updating it there would keep Confluence automatically updated thereby reducing work to keep docs accurate. The first half proved true for devs, the second half did not, the stats showed that almost everyone would paste the markdown source into the in Confluence editor. When we added Mermaid, we saw more of the same. I am not sure how much I can say without violating NDAs, but I would encourage anyone working in this space to work to understand the ratio between how often content is authored vs consumed and by whom in each category. The idea that 1% of people author the content for 99% of consumers that we see on the internet does not translate to corporate environments and this has important product implications.
jumpalongjim 2mo ago
Ok, I've investigated Confluence some more. Publishing a diagram from Line9 Pro gives you a stable URL that serves a pre-rendered SVG and which updates when you modify the Mermaid. This can easily be displayed in Confluence by inserting an image from a link. Problems I found: 1) you'd need to published with public visibility 2) Confluence appears to cache the image, so updates don't appear in the page. Doing this properly in Confluence will need an app, which I don't have yet.

xdotcommer 2mo ago

I dunno... This may not be for everyone but if I consider the amount of time spent correcting diagrams in excalidraw $10 / month seems more than reasonable to me: as long as it's for the creator not the viewer.

jumpalongjim 2mo ago
[dead]
hankbond 2mo ago
Oh I'm not saying I don't want it. If the company would pay for it I certainly would use it. Just yesterday I was dealing with overlapping edge labels and at a loss for how I would futz my way to fix it since I did not want to push the nodes around. It's just that they will pay whatever I want to use in tokens with no questions, but if I ask for a simple time saver like this it has to go through a whole purchasing lifecycle with layers of approvals.
- jumpalongjim 2mo ago
  I recognise your point entirely and I will have to take it onboard for the future of my business. Please do, however, make good use of the website which is completely free, private, needs no signup, and gives you export to SVG and PNG. Also let me know if there’s anything else that would make it more usable. Many thanks.