Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?

https://www.draw.io is an elegant open-sourced program for that purpose. It has apps to install on Mac, Windows. Highly recommend.

Really just a personal ray-tracing app. I coded it up in C# with an event-loop to update, and mouse-clicks emit a ray to hit-test against an object, allowing for interactivity. Then you can draw anything that you can programmatically describe to the ray-tracer.

I mean, a scatter plot's axes can be drawn as cylinders while the points can be spheres, etc., which makes it simple enough to throw together from most quick ray-tracing tutorial projects.

But what's really cool is that, once you put some objects together that form graphs and such, it's trivial to merge them with other scenes. Like, I was really interested in having a 3D walk-through of a chemical processing plant, where I could insert graphs linked to real-time data, where the graphs themselves are just part of the ray-traced scene (rather than being something like a skin on an object). So then the 3D walk-through basically has pop-up data views.

But for stuff like documents, I mostly just think of ray-tracing as the brute-force solution to anything that's not more easily done using another tool. I think the first time I used it for a plain graph, I was frustrated by trying to make a plot that had both surfaces and point-bubbles in it. So, I figured, hey, surfaces can just be interpolations of sample points, and the point-bubbles can just be little spheres.

I also mostly work in LaTeX but I draw with Asymptote: http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/gallery/. It matches the same bullet points as you have written but I like that is it standalone, not usually part of the LaTeX compile, and that it carries the MetaFont algorithms to 3D. There is a great tutorial at https://math.uchicago.edu/~cstaats/Charles_Staats_III/Notes_....

I use the graphtheory package a lot: https://github.com/taoari/asy-graphtheory.

I really enjoy lucid chart, after using gliffy for a long time, I am now stuck on lucid.

https://www.lucidchart.com

Very surprised to see no one mentioning yeD here. It is _the one_ diagram making tool I go to, when I make any diagrams related to software development. The only areas where I had issues with it, that I can remember were:

- "How do I teach it to make these halfcircle-circle joints of component diagrams?"

- Sequence diagrams are a bit slow to make with it, because yeD not knowing their semantics and not doing much for you.

Apart from that, it has many features I depend on and that save time:

+ far more functionality than things like drawio

+ performance when dragging stuff around, no lags like in many browser apps

+ Export formats: SVG, PDF, PNG, graphml (its own format, so that you can edit later), others - Also looking like the diagram you created and looking clean, now like Dia

+ forcing rectangular edges

+ connecting edges and shapes so that they stick together, still enforcing rectangular edges, something I find very difficult with other tools like Inkscape and being able to connect the edges to any point of the shape, not so limited like Dia.

+ moving anything will bring up helping lines and snapping to certain alignments

+ when edges cross there is a setting to display "bridges"

+ Import SVG as new shapes

+ many settings for shapes and independently for labels

+ can add multiple labels to a shape or edge (multiplicities in class diagrams for example, or cardinalities in ERMs)

and probably more thing I don't remember right now.

It is one of the very few Java tools, that really works well for me.

For ASCII I recommend taking a look at Emacs artist mode, especially, if you are already using Emacs to write the code.