DiagEZ for Mermaid Live: from editor to embed

The diagram is finished in Mermaid Live. The next step is the small, repetitive one: get it into the README, wiki page or issue that cannot render Mermaid. Done by hand, that means sharing the diagram, copying the link, opening another tab, pasting it into a builder, picking a format and copying again. Each step is trivial. If the diagram changes every sprint, that sequence repeats every sprint, and a screenshot starts to look like the easier option even though it cannot be edited later.

Convert where the diagram already is

DiagEZ for Mermaid Live removes the tab switch. On Mermaid Live it adds a floating Copy DiagEZ action, which turns the current diagram into a DiagEZ image URL and places it on the clipboard. The extension popup offers the same conversion with choices: SVG or PNG, one of the built-in themes, a transparent, white or preset background, width, scale and padding, and whether to copy a raw URL, a Markdown image or an HTML image element. DiagEZ is owned by VMCSoft Digital and published and operated by ViWeb Technology.

The extension does not read the editor itself. It decodes the diagram state from the Mermaid Live address, the #pako: fragment that the editor’s Share or Save action writes into the URL. One practical consequence follows: if you have been editing and the address has not caught up, the conversion encodes the older state. The support page covers this case. Use Share or Save first, open the resulting link, then copy.

What leaves the browser, and when

Building and copying the URL happens in Chrome. The diagram is not sent to DiagEZ when the URL is built or copied, and the extension stores rendering preferences rather than Mermaid source. The moment the image is previewed, opened or embedded somewhere, the browser requests it from the DiagEZ service, and the encoded source travels in that request so the server can render and cache it. The encoding is Base64URL, which is reversible by anyone, and the resulting URL is public. A diagram that names internal hosts, customer systems or anything resembling a credential should not be converted this way. The privacy page sets out the permissions, which are scoped to Mermaid Live, the active tab you open the popup from, and local storage.

A generated URL fixes one version of the source. Editing the diagram means sharing again and copying a new link, then updating each place the old one was embedded. Keep the editable source in the repository or notes where it belongs, and treat the URL as the published image, not the working document. The rendered image is output you can regenerate; the source is what you keep.

When the next diagram is ready, share it, copy it and paste the link where a screenshot would otherwise go.