Diagrams · Ditaa macro

The sketch in your code comment is also the diagram on the page

With the Ditaa macro the boxes and arrows your engineers already type out of dashes and pipes - in comments, in READMEs, on the back of a ticket - render as a real diagram on the Confluence page. You get a picture without drawing one, and the plain-text sketch and the published diagram are the same thing.

Try it for free Read the documentation

A ditaa diagram: a green Client box, an arrow to a Storage cylinder, an arrow to a Report shaped like a document. — Typed as dashes and pipes, rendered with the shapes and colours the tags asked for.

Your reviewers read the diagram before it is rendered

The source of a ditaa diagram is a picture already, so it survives being pasted into a terminal, an email or a code comment. A reviewer looking at the raw text sees the layout at a glance rather than a graph description they have to compile in their head.

You get the right shapes and colours from a short tag

Mark a box as storage, a document, an input or a decision with a short tag and it takes the right shape; add a three-letter colour code and it takes the right colour. Your network sketch reads like a network diagram without leaving the plain-text world it was written in.

You tune the drawing to the page it lands on

Scale the drawing up when it is going in front of a room, round the corners or drop the shadows to match your document's tone, and keep adjacent shapes visually separate so a dense diagram stays legible. Let the macro size itself, or fix the height when you need it.

You keep no image files in step with the text

Nothing to install and nowhere to upload: type the art into the macro, or point it at a file where it lives - URL, attachment, Google Drive, or a credentialed S3, SFTP or database connection. A fenced ditaa block inside a Markdown document renders in place too, so the diagram and the paragraph that explains it never drift apart.

What the Kroki bundles do with your diagram

Almost nothing on the Marketplace renders ditaa on its own; it arrives as part of a Kroki bundle, which posts your diagram text to the public kroki.io service and shows the picture that comes back. Here the drawing is produced by the app you already licensed, so your sketch never leaves to be rendered - and the art itself can come from the place it was written, including Google Drive, an S3 bucket or an SFTP server, none of which those apps read.

Ditaa is one of 31 macros in Macro Pack

One app to install, one licence to renew, one place your team learns - and 30 more formats it already reads, from spreadsheets and diagrams to API specs and documents.

See every macro in the pack