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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