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Troubleshooting

It won't compile a specific label or value​

It probably has some reserved characters, wrap it around ' or ".

The text is rendered too wide/long​

Add newlines.

Connections look cluttered​

If you have a highly connected diagram with many connections on shapes with short labels, you will get better results by manually settings widths and heights on them. By default, D2 adds a minimal amount of padding to shapes past the label dimensions. When a shape has many connections, increasing dimensions will give it more surface area for the connections to route aesthetically to.

Reserved keywords as regular keys​

If you'd like to use a reserved keyword as a key, just quote it:

My diagram is breaking with HTML in Markdown​

Your HTML must be semantic to be parsed in SVG XML correctly, e.g. use <br/> instead of <br>.

My SVG isn't interactive when I embed into HTML​

There's a few different ways to embed SVG into HTML, each with tradeoffs. If you use plain <img> tags, interactivity is blocked. Here are two good resources to learn more:

  1. tldr: https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/macros/image-svg/#options-for-svg-images
  2. The official W3 spec: https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/resources/svgprimer.html#SVG_in_HTML

Non-ASCII text breaks stuff​

D2 works with any language, but sometimes non-ASCII characters look like reserved characters when they're not.

The character ： is not the same as the ASCII :, and so it won't register as a label. For foreign language diagrams, please take care to use the ASCII versions of special characters like :, ;, ., among others.

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