Using transparent font header removes the node

Question

looking to hide some metadata in the generated svg without including the full source (makes the file larger), a simple version number. Setting the header to transparent doesn't hide the text though, it removes the node entirely. Is this by design or is there another way I can drop e.g. 'version 5' into the svg without affecting the rendered image:

Comments

Hi C., and all,

• Do you really need transparent mode?

Or only `white` will be sufficient!

@startuml
skinparam headerFontColor white
header version 5
@enduml

or:

@startuml
header <color:white>version 5
@enduml

Regards.

---

Well, no of course I don't 'need' transparent, however it would seem more correct to have a node which is transparent, rather than white - then I can correctly change the background to be non-white, or indeed transparent, without the text 're-appearing'.

For the moment I have a workaround, which is to add the version to a link that is elsewhere in the diagram using a query parameter e.g. https://test.com?versionNumber

But that is also not quite correct, hey

---

Perhaps another solution would be the ability to add custom metadata. So either overwrite or append the default diagram metadata that is added, something like:

appendCustomMetaData
Some custom text here should be added to the diagram in the same way the source code is, but not be removed by the -nometadata flags
end appendCustomMetaData

Answer 1

The way I solved this was to edit the SVG directly, and use a comment like <!-- MY VERSION NUMBER -->

This is handy as now I can e.g. link back to plantuml webserver with a more compressed source code encoding (URL) without the whole whitespaced bloat, or link elsewhere to source control etc