Please publish a full list of available SkinParam options to customize diagram theme/colors

+1 vote
asked Feb 14, 2019 in Question / help by ibey7804 (260 points)
retagged Feb 14, 2019 by ibey7804

Please publish the full list of all available SkinParam options on the website and in the PDF documentation. It doesn't seem to be available anywhere.

I do a lot of customization to things on the diagram, like background colors, line colors, font sizes, font colors, etc. It's difficult to know what options are available to change.

The only reference I can find is this:

https://github.com/aklt/plantuml-syntax/blob/master/syntax/plantuml.vim#L117

But ideally, the documentation should contain examples or short descriptions of how each option works.

2 Answers

+1 vote
answered Feb 15, 2019 by zimchaa (1,040 points)

If you have access to the command line version of the tool you can generate it this way:

Source (http://plantuml.com/skinparam)

List

Since the documentation is not always up to date, you can have the complete list of parameters using this command:

java -jar plantuml.jar -language
commented Feb 15, 2019 by ibey7804 (260 points)
Thanks but I don't have access to the command line version. I am using the PlantUML Integration Plugin -- https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7017-plantuml-integration -- for IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio, PyCharm, etc.
+1 vote
answered Feb 19, 2019 by roxspring (260 points)
How about adding a "help" command to provide more of this sort of assistance to non-cli users? I'm thinking "help skinparams" could produce an image listing all the skinparams available in a similar way to "listfonts" but driven by the same code that powers the -language cli option.

"help types", "help keywords", "help preprocessors", "help colors" would also be based on the same approach. "listfonts" functionality could be replicated into "help fonts", and a generic "help" to list the newly created subcommands would also be great.
commented Feb 19, 2019 by roxspring (260 points)
Grrrr. Just got about done with adding "help skinparams" functionality and discovered that there's already an option:

@startuml
skinparameters
@enduml

I find the lack of discoverability for these commands infuriating. :(
commented Feb 19, 2019 by plantuml (294,960 points)
I know that lack of documentation could be very frustrating.
However, the most difficult part is to write this documentation...
Your suggestions about "help" command is very helpful :-)

We are going to implement something so that users could easily proposed some patch/pull request to enhance this embedded documentation.
We'll post a message here when this will be ready
commented Mar 1, 2019 by plantuml (294,960 points)
Ok, we've just commited the last version that has minimal help support.
You can for example have http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/uml/oqZDAG00

The code is very simple to understand.
See:
https://github.com/plantuml/plantuml/tree/master/src/net/sourceforge/plantuml/help

Feel free to contribute :-)
commented Mar 2, 2019 by ashley (140 points)
I've just started a documentation site because I, too, have been frustrated with the lack of documentation for PlantUML.

https://plantuml-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

It's just a start, but I do have a list of all of the skinparam options and a full index.  Here's the page with _all_ of the skinparams:

https://plantuml-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/formatting/all-skin-params.html

I don't have examples or complete information for all of them yet.  But it's a start.  

---

I appreciate that the PlantUML site is now open for user comments and additions.  But it's not well organized, nor is there a comprehensive list of the commands and options.

As I say on my documentation for it, I see my documentation site as helping to make PlantUML even better and more useful.  I hope PlantUML folks see it that way, too.
commented Mar 2, 2019 by ibey7804 (260 points)
Great effort! It would be great if PlantUML website could link to your website.
commented Mar 2, 2019 by plantuml (294,960 points)
Yes, we welcome https://plantuml-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ idea.
We agree that our documentation is far from perfect. Writing a simple documentation is not a simple task...
And we are focusing on the code itself rather the documentation.
We'll put a link to https://plantuml-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest somewhere, and we also hope that this would help us to better organize our own website :-)
Thanks !
commented Mar 2, 2019 by ashley (140 points)
Glad you're OK with this.  

I'm a software engineer, so I definitely understand how much work it takes to document (having helped write user docs and manuals) _and_ how much work it is to create the software.

Let me know if you have any suggestions or corrections!
commented Apr 16, 2019 by rd27 (460 points)
I also have added the help skinparams info to the wiki at http://wiki.plantuml.net/site/skinparam. In it I included a link to the appropriate page at https://plantuml-documentation.readthedocs.io.

Really I think the right long term answer is to move the docs inside the plantuml github repo. That is non trivial since they are in wiki format, but perhaps there is something that will translate that to markdown.
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