Hi there, even though Joplin supports it, our forum does not specialise in it. So, I feel like it would be more appropriate to ask for such guide at their support Slack chat
Apparently that Workspace isn't very talkative ...
And on second thought, shouldn't whoever built the rendering engine have the precise syntax? Does anyone know who is responsible here & if it's possible to contact this person?
Mermaid is a nice library but unfortunately it's poorly documented and poorly implemented too, so you pretty much need to try and see what works and search on their forum or GitHub.
Sure. I am familiar with the page you're referring to and it's nice, but doesn't really give me a proper picture of syntax or semantics.
I'm mainly interested in gantt, so let's look at those diagrams.
You can set a date format for the tasks as well as a separate date format for the axis, so this is nice .
Things get a bit foggy when you start to specify your tasks in the section(s).
Apparently (there are going to be a lot of "apparently's" here) a task name is separated from it's parameters by a colon. It doesn't really say that anywhere, but I gather that from the example. There is no terminator in a task description if I look at the examples; is this correct? So is a line break the terminating item here?
Apparently I can qualify a task as {done | active | critical | milestone} which have different semantics. "done" and "critical" lead to different colours, whereas using "active" or not using it has no (discernible?) impact. I can also combine "critical" and "done", but it is not clear to me what happens if I do this. And are there other combinations permitted? Are there more qualifications here not listed in any example; perhaps parameters signifying priorities.
Apparently I can give a task a reference which is accessible in other tasks. Are these names global or restricted to a section?
After these parameters comes the starting date of the task (a milestone of course only has one date). I can specify a starting date or I can specify a dependency to another referenced task ("after task 1"). Can tasks also start "before" another task? Must tasks start directly after a previous task or can I write something like "3d after task1"?
Similarly, the target date can be given as a fixed date, or as a timespan relative to the starting date. Since the date format is described in detail, this is straightforward.
Apparently the dates are entirely optional and I can just give a timespan for a task, and mermaid will assume this task directly follows the previous task. Is this the case? Can I use a reference here again; can I set a task to begin x days after another task?
These are some of the questions I'm pondering just now. I'll probably get to a working knowhow after experimenting around a bit; i just thought that there might be something more precise than a set of examples.
Regarding your question about why I do not raise an issue in their repo: I'm not contributing anything to the development, so I'm happy to work with what's on offer. If a complete description does not exist, ok; I'll manage with the existing stuff. I just thought that since I'm pretty new to this, perhaps I've just overlooked something that everybody else was aware of. If I was mistaken here, my apologies.
I was also trying to make a Gantt chart and I had a lot of the same questions. The documentation isn't particularly good so it took me a while to figure out how to do what I wanted.
I also struggled when trying to learn some of the finer details of mermaid.
I didn't find a single place that answered everything, so I produced the following for flowcharts which was based on a particular use case of mine, but I do also touch on Gantt charts there too.
...
.