[FEATURE] PlantUML Processing - Parameter Support

[SieDa]

Description
Instead of only providing a [Refresh]-Button it would be nice to influence the processing similar to some PlantUML Command Line features.

1. Run Simple Instructions directly without entering this code.

@startuml
instruction
@enduml

That can be achieved in the command line by calling:

java -jar plantuml.jar -instruction

So open a Pull Down Area that shows further buttons in the Preview Pane:
[Author], [Version], [Stdlib]

2. Run more complex instructions without needing to go to the command line.
   Add addition Buttons, that use the PlantUML command line to provide
   [Help], [Language], [Printfonts]

3. Process the the source code similar to using the commandline

• Provide a Button [Process] besides [Refresh]
• In the drop down area described before, provide a list of PlantUML Command Line parameters to select and may be enable to choose or enter a value (setting the standard parameters for Processing)
• Show the resulting Command line to copy paste it to Git Bash or any other shell.

Stepwise you can support -nometadata, -charset, ... all that make sense for a single source file.

With different preview styles you can do this for
-teps, -teps:text, -thtml, -tlatex, -tlatex:nopreamble, -tpdf, -tpng, -tscxml, -tsvg, -ttxt, -tutxt, -tvdx, -txmi, ...

Solution
On Processing - different to Refresh - the PlantUML Processing ist used to deliver a result into the output area.
[View Code] might be an option to provide a button to show the source code of some of those (svg, txt, latex, ...) in notepad, if that makes sense.

[Fruchtzwerg94]

Hi @SieDa ,

note that PlantUmlViewer aims to be a simple GUI integration to preview diagrams. It shall not be some kind of code or command generator.
What exactly is your use case behind this request? What is the reason not just to use the CLI directy for advanced usage like this? I don't see how this could improve the PlantUmlViewer plugin.

BR, Philipp

[SieDa]

Hi Philipp, well done so far.

There are three major reasons in case you only have N++ to edit the code, then

1. it provides to preview directly the SVG to be readable in any scaling.
2. it provides to directly produce the same result as if the command line is used, just to avoid switching between n++ edit, shell process and browser preview (or what ever is needed).
3. it provides faster access to CLI Informations in the "simple GUI".

Does that make sense to you?
Best regards
SieDa

[Fruchtzwerg94]

Hi @SieDa ,

I don't see which parameters / arguments you want so set in a specific way and read out here. PlantUML is called straight forward without any specific arguments. The only thing difference to a standard call is using pipes and splitting the diagram pages into several generation steps. This means there are potentially multiple commands to be executed.
Maybe nppexec is what you are looking for here? Using the plugin you can call PlantUML directly to generate and open the SVG.

BR,
Philipp