Parsing plantuml code to images

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1

hello,

I’m a newby in confluence plugins so please forgive potentially stupid questions i’m asking (there isn’t much information on the Internet about writing plugins in confluence).

i am trying to build the plugin and macro for it which will take excerpt (via excerpt include macro) with text and will render it into the image (svg / png).

with regards to that, i have some questions:

  1. is it possible to return an image from the macro? not just a text? it would be great if some kind of sample exists.

  2. how can i use excerpt content as an input for my plugin?

  3. is there any kind of temporary folder that may be used by my plugin on confluence server (if external jar required temporary storage for creating the image file)?

  4. is there any restrictions having jar in the resources folder for confluence plugin? ( i need plantuml.jar which is available in github as <Class-Path>resources/lib/*.jar</Class-Path> pom entry) or can i add new repository to pom?

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/net.sourceforge.plantuml/plantuml-epl -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>net.sourceforge.plantuml</groupId>
    <artifactId>plantuml-epl</artifactId>
    <version>1.2023.10</version>
</dependency>

thanks.