Quickstart

Draw, press, name#

1. Draw boxes, ovals, diamonds, circles, triangles, and other shapes, and join them with lines. Draw a line as dashes to make it dotted, or go over it again to make it thick. A finger, a pen, or a mouse all work. Strokes can be as wobbly as a quick sketch, and holding still at the end of one tidies it.
2. Press Mermaidify. The line under the drawing says what was read, and dashed outlines on the drawing show each shape it found, with its letter.
3. Name the shapes and lines. Tap a shape or a line on the drawing, or a shape or a line's name in the diagram, and type its name. Names follow their shapes and lines when you draw more and press Mermaidify again. Under Names, each shape's menu changes how it looks, and each line's menu makes it plain, dotted, or thick, without drawing it again.
4. Choose the diagram. A drawing reads as a flowchart unless you choose State diagram under Read as, below the diagram, or in More. State diagrams says what changes.
5. Copy or save the Mermaid code, or save the diagram as SVG or PNG. The code box takes edits, and you can paste your own Mermaid into it too.

The drawing stays in this browser between visits, so a reload or a rotated phone keeps it. Undo and Redo cover every stroke, erase, cut, and clear.

Writing names with a pen#

Where the keyboard reads handwriting, you can write a name instead of typing it: tap a shape or a line with the pen, then write in the box that opens, or in any field under Names. On a Samsung Galaxy with an S Pen, that is S Pen to text with Samsung Keyboard; Gboard's handwriting and an iPad's Scribble work the same way. The keyboard turns the writing into text and types it. mermaidify gets only the text, so it reads no handwriting itself, and what the keyboard does with your writing is up to the keyboard.