Hi. The Lucidchart plugin in Atlassian Confluence has a number of issues and I wanted to see if other people share similar experience or not. 

Firstly, there are two options: Simple viewer and Rich viewer.

Rich viewer:

Rich viewer never been my favourite because it shows all those frames and buttons etc. and I don’t like to include them in my Confluence page. Imagine you have a diagram with multiple tabs each of which for certain part of a system and in your confluence you are only referring to one, there is really no need for the reader to switch to other tabs. If the author of the page wants to talk about other tabs, then they will need to display them directly rather than asking the reader to go to tab x, y or z.

I also found the zoom-in and zoom-out buttons annoying. When you zoom in, it’s not easy to navigate through the diagram. I rather to see the whole diagram in one big picture. But I do understand there could be diagrams that need this feature, hence I always use Simple Viewer

Simple Viewer

This view is better but still have issues. What I’d like to see if to extend the frame to any length/dimension I want in my Confluence page and the plugin automatically stretch (or zoom) to fit the dimension. But currently that’s not what’s happening. Well, strangely it sometimes happens sometimes not, not sure if this is because Lucid releases new versions and they keep changing its behaviour or some other issues or bugs in the plugin itself. Right now in my page, even though I enlarged the frame to fit the width of the Confluence page, the final view shows my diagram as a small (only honours the height of the frame). 

see below how so much space is wasted and my diagram is shown on the left side 

What I like to see is it zooms and fits the diagram to the page so the readers don’t need to zoom in, at least for most cases.

Plugin’s feature

“Automatically update the diagram” feature never worked for me. 

The page number is also not user friendly, perhaps it would be better if the tab’s title would be used to decide what tab/page to display. 

Also, when for the first time you want to add a diagram to your page, when you select the diagram from the search page, it doesn’t give us the options to choose what page or dimension we want and it goes straight to rendering the frame and that means we need to open the plugin again to update them.

Overall I am personally not happy with this plugin, it’s in fact very annoying and the fact that its behaviour changes makes it even worse. I’d like to hear what everyone else think about it.