Sequence diagram: reducing vertical dimension of diagram

Question

Thanks for the quick reply to my earlier question and for the info about the undocumented maxMessageSize feature. I still think that allowing the text of a message to extend beyond the arrow is useful and that it should be considered. A problem with using text wrapping as the only solution strategy is that it makes the diagram too tall. The diagram will still be to hard to read when put on a printed page, due to the vertical dimension.

Here's another feature request: allow the vertical spacing between successive messages to be reduced, so long as the latter message doesn't interfere with the one that precedes it. Here's an example:

A -> B: Message 1

B -> C: Message 2

As currently implemented Message 2 (and its arrow) will be draw a full "vertical skip" amount below Message 1. If A, B, & C are placed in that order on a sequence diagram, Message 2 will not interfere with Message 1. If PlantUML provides a way to allow the vertical spacing betwen Message 1 & Message 2 to be reduced, the resulting diagram will be more compact vertically.

Answer 1

You should be interested in http://plantuml.sourceforge.net/teoz.html

@startuml
!pragma teoz true
Alice -> Bob : hello
& Bob -> Charlie : hi
@enduml

We are not going forward as quick as we wish on this. Work is still in progress.

Allowing to have text beyond the arrow should be possible with this new layout engine. However, we want first to finish to code existing features before adding new one, so please be patient :-)

Thanks for your suggestions!

Comments

Thanks for the answer and all your good work!