ASCII and Unicode

Text output is first-class, not a fallback: ASCII (portable 7-bit) and Unicode (box-drawing) renders drop straight into terminals, PR comments, commit messages, and agent transcripts where an SVG cannot go.

am render diagram.mmd --format ascii    # portable, 7-bit
am render diagram.mmd --format unicode  # sharper box-drawing glyphs

The text path is deterministic like the SVG path, so the same source always yields the same characters — reviewable in a plain diff. The ASCII engine is ported from mermaid-ascii; see About for the lineage.

Docs index

• Start
  • Getting started
  • Examples
• Use locally
  • Library API
  • CLI
  • MCP
• Debug
  • Warnings
  • Errors
  • Quality
• Reference
  • ASCII and Unicode
  • Styles and palettes
  • Custom styles
  • Fork differences