Feature Request: Extension for PlantUML

[Digicrat]

I've begun using Plantuml within my Doxygen Markdown files, but I'm missing the ability to quickly preview in place that I can get in org-mode. In some cases, content within the plantuml diagram is currently being parsed as Markdown syntax in annoying ways.

Would it be possible to add support for the Plantuml "@startuml ... @enduml" tags to markdown-mode?

Support for PlantUML within Markdown is currently supported by both Doxygen (as a Doxygen tag) and Gitlab.

Specifically, my thought (to save re-running Doxygen each time I want to preview one diagram) is to have behavior similar to org-babel-mode (but without the extra "#+BEGIN_SRC" blocks such that:

• Any region between the "@startuml" and "@enduml", inclusive of the tags, should be parsed to plantuml-mode for syntax highlighting.
• A preview function that can be invoked for the currently focused diagram, wrapping that for PlantUML, that automatically stores the preview in a temporary file that's displayed in a new buffer.
• Inclusion of PlantUML in Markdown export/preview (though this feature isn't actually useful to me at present)

[Digicrat]

After posting this, I discovered "plantuml-preview-current-block" command. I bound this to a key in markdown-mode to achieve my desired preview functionality rather easily. It would still be nice to see syntax highlighting and automatic parsing during export in markdown mode though.