Anytime I try mermaid for anything more complex than a toy diagram I always end up absolutely frustrated by the arcane and topologically poor layout that is produced.

Styling seems like a trivial problem by comparison.

I strongly agree, and that's why I designed Pele to only follow its syntax not its layout. See the examples https://pele.run/examples

The playground also has a Compare mode https://pele.run/playground

I kinda just shove what I want out of it to literally any basic model from the frontier labs, I usually dont need anything super fancy, but it does the job, even color coded regions for me (which is fancier than I usually do) and then I can shove that into Lucid since it can render them.

Graph layout is a famously hard problem!

Is pele open source?

I tried to find the source code of it but I was unable in finding so

Edit: found it, https://github.com/obsidianmd/pele

Also folks, this is a good reminder to please have a github icon on the top of the page to easily show git/github links if the app is open source, also helps in the fact that I can star your projects and bookmark them more easily :-D

Looks like https://github.com/obsidianmd/pele maybe?

Does the official Mermaid library still require a full or headless browser environment in order to lay out the SVG? If so, Pele is great news for embedding Mermaid rendering in other places.

There is also Merman on Github that outputs a SVG.

https://github.com/Latias94/merman

The python mermaidx library works for this, which works well for generating documentation with embedded diagrams as part of CI/CD but the layout/rendering can sometimes be very wonky. For instance I will have a bunch of connections crossing over each other instead of neatly arranged to avoid it. Changing the layout settings does not fix it so sometimes I will just export it from mmdc and embed a png.

Just FYI, "pele" is "mouse" in Latvian. :)

and "skin" in portuguese :)

and a football player in brazil :D

Only with an accent on the final é.

and "d*ck" in slovak...

Spade in French