Themes for your diagrams
The PlantUML ‘language’ allows themes to be applied. There are quite a few created by the community and some are integrated directly into the language itself.
To make it easy to try out some of these themes we’ve added the option to apply themes in the PlantUML Editor for both Confluence and Jira versions of our app.
It’s really simple to do in only one step…
Selecting Your Theme
Click the Themes menu and select your theme
How does it apply the theme?
It adds a line to the top of your PlantUML indicating what theme should be used. This is standard PlantUML functionality, we’ve just made it a bit easier to choose your theme. For example, when choosing the Cerulean theme see how the first line of the PlantUML has been inserted to apply that theme.
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!theme cerulean
@startuml
title Simple Sequence Diagram
activate Browser
Browser-> API : testMethod()
activate API
API -> API : do some checks
API --> Browser : return 200 (OK)
deactivate API
deactivate Browser
@enduml
NOTE: if you have already added your own theme using the !theme code then it will be removed and replaced with the theme you chose from the menu.
More Information
If you’d like more information about using themes in your diagrams see the official PlantUML themes page. All of the themes on there are supported by this app and you can apply them by typing in your own !themes command… but be careful though - quite a few of the themes detailed on that page have text on the arrows rendered in white (which doesn’t look good on a white background!) so you’d need to look at using the more advanced skinparam options to change your background or font colour.
PlantUML can generate a huge number of different diagram types so not every theme is able to affect every diagram type effectively. Theming works best with the more common diagram types, such as Sequence Diagrams, Class Diagrams, etc but may not work so well with Network Diagrams, Gantt Charts, etc.