Original Article : Read on Medium

Summary

This article guides you on creating your own PlantUML sprites library to enhance diagrams with custom visuals. I explain how to set up your environment using a Devcontainer, and the process of generating sprites from images by resizing and converting them to grayscale with tools like Mogrify and the PlantUML CLI’s create_sprites.sh script. You will learn to integrate these sprites into your diagrams using !includeurl and how to build comprehensive libraries with PlantUML Macros for a less verbose syntax. I also touch upon a more advanced, manual approach for creating highly customized components. This ultimately provides you with the power to create more visually engaging and personalized PlantUML diagrams.

Key Concepts

• PlantUML Sprites: Graphic elements for styling PlantUML components.
• PlantUML Macros: Functions for defining configuration sets in PlantUML.
• PlantUML Libraries: Collection of sprites that can be reused to create diagrams with custom style

References

• PlantUML sprite
• PlantUML Hitchhikers Guide
• Stdlib Overview