Diagrams#

A diagram is boxes, arrows and labels drawn on a canvas inside the document itself. A flow through a system, an escalation path, the four services and which one calls which — the drawing that usually ends up as a photograph of a whiteboard pasted into a page.

Draw one#

Type /diagram in the editor and choose Diagram. The canvas opens over the page.

• Pick a tool: rectangle, ellipse, diamond, text, or the connector.
• Drag on the canvas to draw a shape. Drag its corner to resize it, drag its middle to move it.
• Draw a connector from one shape to another. Pin an end to a side of a box — top, right, bottom or left — or leave it floating, in which case the line meets the box wherever it crosses it.
• Select a shape to give it a label and a colour, or a connector a label and an arrowhead.
• Undo takes back the last change. Canvas sets the width and height of the drawing.
• Save, and the drawing lands where you typed the command.

Double-click a diagram to open it again. Anybody who can edit the document can edit the picture — there is no separate file to find, check out or re-upload.

/diagram works in every editor in Laver: wiki pages, page comments, ticket descriptions, ticket comments and quick notes.

Colours are names, not paint#

The five fills — default, blue, green, yellow and coral — are names that the app themes. A diagram drawn in the light theme is legible to a colleague reading it in the dark theme, which a picture of a whiteboard is not.

What a diagram is#

Not a file. The shapes are stored in the document, which is what makes all of this true:

• It copies and pastes with the text around it, including into a different page, ticket or comment.
• It is in the page's version history like any other edit.
• It never fills your workspace's storage allowance, and there is no attachment to lose.
• Shapes can be copied and pasted inside the canvas, or between two diagrams.

The other side of that: a diagram is a picture and the export formats are text. Exporting a page as Markdown, HTML, ODT or PDF, or editing it as Markdown, leaves the drawing out rather than flattening it — see Wiki pages.

Limits#

Past those a drawing is a document of its own, and it is better split into two.