Original Article : Read on Medium

Summary

This article guides you through creating a personalized sprites library for PlantUML, enhancing diagrams with custom visuals. You will learn how to convert images to PlantUML sprites and use the generated sprites in your PlantUML diagrams. Finally, I demonstrate how to create a PlantUML library by adding styling definitions to elements using Macros, and the use of !define and !includeurl to create a less verbose and intuitive diagram definition.

As a bonus, I detailed setting up a Devcontainer environment, simplifying the setup of all tooling requirements.

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