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May 30, 2024
Seeking Feedback

Implement proper integration with PlantUML Markup language

Related products:Lucidchart
  • May 30, 2024
  • 38 replies
  • 4383 views

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.

Pinned Reply By kellsworth

Thanks to everyone for the thoughts in this thread. I’m on the Product team here at Lucid and will be starting up some research soon around how people like to work with markup languages such as Plant UML and Mermaid and what an ideal experience would look like. If would be interested in a conversation, please respond in this thread, and I'll reach out with more information!

Comments

December 11, 2024

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.

Ambar D
Lucid community team
December 12, 2024

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:

 

December 26, 2024

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)

 

Kelsey Gaag
Lucidite
December 26, 2024

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.

February 7, 2025

Please add support for PlantUML.

 

I recently got an architecture diagram (in PlantUML format) as a response to my Google Gemini LLM prompt. I tried rendering this in LucidChart and it didn’t work at all.

Ambar D
Lucid community team
February 7, 2025

Hi ​@llc, thank you for adding your feedback to this thread! I can certainly understand how this feature would be beneficial.  

March 4, 2025

Any E.T.A for PlantUML support?  It’d be really helpful.

Kelsey Gaag
Lucidite
March 6, 2025

Hi ​@z-altunn

Thank you for the reply! We currently do not have any updates on PlantUML support. For information on how Lucid evaluates product requests please check out this community post.

 

March 12, 2025

+1 from me on this feature. Providing full support for PlantUML markup formats is highly desired within my organisation.

Ambar D
Lucid community team
March 14, 2025

Hi ​@osbuzz, thank you for upvoting this post and adding your feedback to this thread to indicate your support for this feature request!