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

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

#81

Post by sgaur »

open-source-ux wrote: post #5

Any vector drawing tool will let you create a diagram like the example you posted. Examples: Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator, Sketch (Mac only), Affinity Designer, Figma (browser-based with an Electron desktop client). You'll have to design and style the diagram yourself though. With a vector drawing app, there are no constraints on how the diagram could look - the appearance is entirely up to you. Dedicated diagramming…

Thanks for mentioning Visio, it is now available on the browser as well, for basic, business, flowcharts, network, and cross-functional flowcharts. $5/per user/per month (annual plan) https://products.office.com/en-us/visio/visio-online-plan-1

Disclosure: I work for the Visio team, so if you have any feedback pls lmk.

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

#82

Post by sgaur »

eatonphil wrote: post #58

I've been looking off and on for the past year or two. The scene is depressing. Or there is just no market for cross-platform applications. However I doubt that is the case as over time there have been more fully-featured, once-desktop-only applications competing successfully cross-platform. (Figma vs. Sketch for example.) Draw.io is free but requires you to do so much work yourself to create objects, size them, grou…

Thanks for mentioning Visio. I work for the Visio team, so if you have any feedback pls lmk.

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

#83

Post by amelius »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #49

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…

Since it's free, even for commercial use, I'm wondering what their business model is.

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

#84

Post by eatonphil »

sgaur wrote: post #82
eatonphil wrote: post #58

I've been looking off and on for the past year or two. The scene is depressing. Or there is just no market for cross-platform applications. However I doubt that is the case as over time there have been more fully-featured, once-desktop-only applications competing successfully cross-platform. (Figma vs. Sketch for example.) Draw.io is free but requires you to do so much work yourself to create objects, size them, grou…

Thanks for mentioning Visio. I work for the Visio team, so if you have any feedback pls lmk.

Bring Visio online to feature parity with Visio desktop! Demonstrated progress/goals toward this would go a long way too.

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

#86

Post by sramam »

lichtenberger wrote: post #12
mirimir wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I used CorelDRAW, some years ago. In your example, they obviously created (or borrowed) several icons, and then arranged them.

I have to say I'm not really experienced, but where do you find such icons, such that they can be simply imported into whichever (preferrably open source) vector graphics software?

https://thenounproject.com/

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

#87

Post by Parkkeeper »

I use the Camuna Modeler (https://github.com/camunda/camunda-modeler) for business process models with my sideproject, that tries to describe a startup adventure as a business process to get the acceptance of the middle management of big corporates. It is quite easy to use, well maintained, and comes with all the required features.

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

#88

Post by originate »

anhldbk wrote: post #41

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

This is my first choice as well. Found it when I moved from windows (and therefore Visio) to Mac. Doesn’t have exhaustive feature parity, but everything I needed for UML drawings works great. Natively supports source control to Github which was also great to keep documentation with the code.

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

#89

Post by shezi »

amelius wrote: post #83
zelphirkalt wrote: post #49

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…

Since it's free, even for commercial use, I'm wondering what their business model is.

Yed is the "demo product" for their java library which you can integrate into products to get diagram drawing and editing functionality. I know of a few enterprise products that use it. I have worked for the professor where yworks was started and we got to use the generous academic license for the library.

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

#90

Post by ykevinator »

int0x80 wrote: post #52
becauseiam wrote: post #32

Graphviz for simple diagrams that can represented with basic shapes. PlantUML for sequence diagrams, state machines and the likes. Powerpoint/Keynote for things that are presentations - and usually I will export one of the above formats as SVG, clean it up a bit, turn into PDF and drop into the slides. As a general rule all my diagrams must be vector based, and no bitmap objects should be embedded. Confluence with Gr…

For a subset of "ASCII art" diagrams, check http://asciiflow.com I find it handy sometimes :)

I love ascii flow bc it's universal, copy and paste, etc
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