[aloisklink]

I'm one of the maintainers of the mermaid-cli project, and unfortunately, no.

Mermaid needs a browser's layout engine to run properly [1], but I haven't yet seen a library that will help us without puppeteer.

And yep, NPM (or another Node.JS package manager) is still needed for installation. I was working on trying to bundle all of mermaid-cli's dependencies (aka Node.JS, puppeteer) into one massive single-file exe last weekend, but it's seems we're blocked by missing features in other packages [2].

If anyone has any ideas on how to implement these things easily, feel free to help-out :) I'm also not a big fan of puppeteer, so I'd love to see a way to go without it.

[1]: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/issues/3650

[2]: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli/issues/467#issueco...

[andrewshadura]

Why is it so difficult to do the layout yourself and generate SVG directly?

[ygra]

My guess would be that text layout and measuring is something that's very easy to offload to the browser, yet, if you want to do this without, you're pulling in a whole lot of other dependencies (text rendering is quite complex) that you maybe cannot reasonably call from JS.