Implement proper integration with PlantUML Markup language

One of the selling points of lucidchart for my organisation was the fact that one could use PlantUML Markup language we define diagrams which would allow use to keep all diagrams within lucidchart. The documentation mentions that and also talks about some of the options that can be used. However, after effectively trying to import a simple PlantUML into your tool, the result was not the expected.

Not only it doesn’t support the standards and some basic features, it also doesn’t support some of the features that you say that supports (i.e. “actor” entity) and even after trying to cleanup everything that is not supported, the diagram is simply unreadable.

UML is used for technical diagrams nad people that make them know what they are doing. Instead of trying to implement something from scratch 8which is what you were trying to do), you could simply implement/integrate fully with PlantUML, which is a known, stable and robust markup language to design and render diagrams.

PlanUML has free integration and the integration documentation is clear and simple to follow. You don’t need to make it “fancy” or allow to style component individually since that is not what tech people are looking for and PlantUML already supports it out of the box with several teams and styling.

The integration can be really simple to the point you just render the diagram itself or add a container into the page where the diagram is rendered. plantULM generates SVG diagrams which works well with the system you already have anyway.

Without this feature it will be very difficult to sell the usage of this tool for tech work since we will still need to use a different tool to manage PlantUML diagrams vs normal/standard diagrams, which seems to beat the purpose of your tool.

Hope this is really considered since it will be an HUGE selling point for tech teams.

Here some resources to make your life easier:

Happy to discuss this with someone on Lucidchart side.

Many thanks.

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@miguel.pinto — thank you so much for taking the time to reach out to us, and for providing this incredibly thoughtful level of detail. I’m a PM at Lucidchart and would appreciate the chance to speak with you further on this — I’ll reach out via email!

@Chloe do you have any updates for the community. I’m a VP of Engineering and have rolled out Lucid for all of our Engineering documentation needs. UML features in Lucid need to fully support PlantUML and possibly Mermaid. Our engineers are preferring these code first tools for UML and now I have leakage of Engineering documentation be fragmented across tools which was what we wanted to avoid by rolling out Lucid!

Hi Kyle! Thanks for your message. We don’t have active work to enhance our PlantUML features, but we do have Mermaid support coming soon! We’ll be sure to update this thread when it’s released.

Hi @Kyle Z. wanted to circle back here and let you know - Mermaid is now a capability! Full details here: https://help.lucid.co/hc/en-us/articles/29549366940948-Diagram-as-code-with-Mermaid-in-Lucidchart

@Chloe @Aimee G

it’s nice that Mermaid integration is not available. However, unfortunately Mermaide doesn’t have the same level of control or functionality has PlantUML (which is a lot more mature and used across the board by engineering teams).

As discussed with you before, integration with PlantUML can be vey simple from your side side all the “magic” happens on the PlantUMS server and you just need to add the SVG generated to the canvas and keep a copy of the text attached so that the user can edit it and update the diagram.

It would be a HUGE improvement to your functionalities and one that will be very very very appreciated by all tech teams (these are mainly tech tools and not something that basic users will be using),

Please have a serious consideration over this.

Hi @miguel.pinto,

Thank you for the additional feedback!

Hi All

Plantuml comes along as a standalone jar file https://plantuml.com/download

Should not be too hard to integrate that

Hi @beatt, thank you for your contribution to this idea! We encourage anyone else who’s interested in this to upvote this post and share any additional details about your use case or what you’d like to see in this experience. For more information about how we manage feedback in this community, please take a look at this post.

Lack of basic support like the ‘participant’ command make building good looking sequence diagrams very difficult. Please add full support for plantUML.

Hi @gffletchatc1, thank you for upvoting this idea and taking the time to share your feedback! This is the perfect place to do so.

I fully agree with the direction of this conversation. There is nothing better for creating activity diagrams than PlantUML. I played around with what Lucid is doing and it appears that they are only supporting the dumbed down Mermaid syntax. This leaves out very basic capabilities (like a database type of participant for example, among many other things). I was very hopeful when I saw LucidChart claiming to support PlantUML capabilities, but it is not really true. Lucidchart really needs to either support the full PlantUML syntax one way or another. Right now, I still have to switch back and forth between Lucidchart and PlantUML depending on the type of diagram that I am creating, which is not a good experience.

Hi @nutmeg, thank you for your feedback here and for providing details on what you would like to see in this experience! The best way to show support for this product feature idea is to upvote this post, so I encourage that if you haven’t already.

For more information on how Lucid manages feedback via this community, take a look at this post:

我覺得如果我都靠 https://chatgpt.com/ 產生plantuml語法

而lucidchart只能把外部圖片會進去的話，或是我只能在lucidchart手動拉元件的話

可能會考慮只靠plantuml語法來產生圖片

AP工具描述->圖片 (plantuml無法編輯)

AP工具描述->圖片 ->元件(使用lucidchart編輯)

你好 @eggplant,

感謝您的額外回饋。我們感謝您對此功能的倡議。我們鼓勵對此感興趣的任何其他人對這篇文章進行投票，並分享有關您的用例或您希望在此體驗中看到的內容的任何其他詳細資訊。有關我們如何管理此社區中的反饋的更多信息，請查看此帖子：

Translation:
Hi,
Thank you for the additional feedback. We appreciate your advocacy for this feature. We encourage anyone else who’s interested in this to upvote this post and share any additional details about your use case or what you’d like to see in this experience. For more information about how we manage feedback in this community, please take a look at this post.

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