Rendering Mermaid Without a Browser: mmdc vs mermaidx vs merman

I went looking for why a diagram-rendering tool on my machine depended on Google Chrome, and came out with three renderers benchmarked and two assumptions broken. The setup: I have a small tool that turns conversation context into a Mermaid diagram and renders it as a PNG. It called mmdc , the official Mermaid CLI. mmdc drives a headless Chromium through Puppeteer, so it needs a…