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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?

#111

Post by eloycoto »

specialdragon wrote: post #27

http://plantuml.com I've been doing a lot of flow diagrams and PlantUML has been invaluable. I specifically like it because sharing the flow means sharing some text, which itself is vaguely human-readable. There's an online renderer (bottom of the page in the above link), which means simple diagrams are also quick to create and view. It's got a few different modes that it understands but I'd definitely add it to the…

I'm 100 agree! Plantuml is great, not as pretty as other tools but build diagrams for internal doc is awesome!like conflucence, wiki, sphinx, etc.. I'm in love with!

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

#112

Post by zacman85 »

Keynote is actually a surprisingly good tool for building diagrams once you learn the interface and features. I use it for all of our architecture diagrams and for generating printable posters of such to hang in our office. I have tried nearly everything else, but unless you need semantics native to your diagram, Keynote is (oddly, I know) the best I have found.

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

#114

Post by dahart »

For serious print work, still nothing beats Illustrator. (And I really really wish something would.)

I really like gravit.io as an online lightweight version of Illustrator. For me it has been especially good for online targeted diagrams, e.g., for blog posts & web pages.

For my shameless plug, I helped build a whiteboarding tool that is great for simple hand-drawn diagrams, and truly looks whiteboardy. https://limnu.com. We intentionally kept the tools simple so you can iterate and obsess over the idea rather than the look. That might not be what you mean by “beautiful diagrams”, but personally I find a good whiteboard diagram quite beautiful. Maybe it’s a functional beauty. We used Limnu to create all the diagrams for the online book “Ray Tracing in One Weekend.” http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing/Ray%20Tracing%20...

I also worked at LucidChart for a while, and I know first-hand it’s very powerful and quite good compared to almost everything online, especially for flowcharts and serveral pre-baked styles of data driven diagrams.

Recently I used plotdevice.io to build a 3d line renderer for a bunch of diagrams in a book. It’s a Mac environment that is similar to Processing, but is based on Python and has built-in PDF export.

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

#115

Post by sridca »

sridca wrote: post #79
jasonshen wrote: post #71

One that I haven't seen mentioned on this list is Plectica - great for explaining complex / in-depth concepts in a clean and easy to update / present / view fashion. Really robust forever-free option too. https://www.plectica.com

Very interesting idea. Basically like mind maps but you can have structured content (eg: lists) in the nodes?

Wow, this app is really cool. Been using it to map out ideas about different things in my life. Thanks for sharing.

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

#116

Post by yowlingcat »

perssontm wrote: post #47

I really enjoy lucid chart, after using gliffy for a long time, I am now stuck on lucid. https://www.lucidchart.com

+1 here, surprised to not see that it's not the top response here. It's always been slick, reliable and easy to use in a collaborative corporate environment. I would wager that Visio is probably similarly nice but I've never played around with it.

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

#117

Post by pier25 »

dahart wrote: post #114

For serious print work, still nothing beats Illustrator. (And I really really wish something would.) I really like gravit.io as an online lightweight version of Illustrator. For me it has been especially good for online targeted diagrams, e.g., for blog posts & web pages. For my shameless plug, I helped build a whiteboarding tool that is great for simple hand-drawn diagrams, and truly looks whiteboardy. https://limnu…

I frequently fall back to Illustrator too. It lacks a lot of features, but the low level control is great and it's still the best vector graphics software.

I've been using vectors since Corel Draw 4 in the 90s and have tried pretty much everything. I still prefer Illustrator over Sketch, Affinity Designer, and all these new web based tools (Figma, etc).

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

#118

Post by j2kun »

charlesdaniels wrote: post #98

Depending on what type of diagram I need, I use one of: 1. LaTeX + TikZ - if my diagram is simple or lends itself well to the TikZ syntax, I can usually get it done quickly and have it look professional. 2. Graphviz - if I'm drawing anything that can be represented as a directed graph, Graphiviz is fantastic due to it's automatic positioning and layout. 3. ipe ( http://ipe.otfried.org/ ) - for heavy lifting where nei…

For others reading: TikZ can be made arbitrarily complex. I used it to make this trigonometry puzzle, for example: https://imgur.com/a/z0Pqnlk

The downside is that LaTeX doesn't support many primitives that engineers are used to, such as arrays.

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

#119

Post by rajaganesh87 »

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.

Please make a Mac version

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

#120

Post by the_other_guy »

Flavius wrote: post #91

Shameless plug: https://diagramiq.com/ This is a product that I've been working on for the last 2 years. You won't be able to create those animated diagrams (yet), but you can create pretty much anything else: Flowcharts, UML, BPMN, VENN, server architecture and other unique diagrams.

This is really great
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