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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?

#151

Post by janaagaard »

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…

https://www.planttext.com/

Has an online split screen view with your text on one side, and the diagram in the other. It's quite crude - no auto refresh, for example - but it works.

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

#152

Post by Angostura »

freehunter wrote: post #123
sgaur wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mac. Pleeeeeeease support Mac! I'm a technical consultant who was given a Macbook for work and I have to run a VM to use Visio. We're working on spec'ing out a replacement technology that works on Mac, but none of the competitors are as good as Visio, and all of our clients expect Visio. In 2019 we've got a team of 65 people all ditching Visio (and our Windows VMs) and going with LucidChart or Omnigraffle because we…

Try Omnigraffle Pro - imports and exports to Visio.

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

#153

Post by ctchocula »

13415 wrote: post #124
ctchocula wrote: post #15

I use Dia: http://dia-installer.de/ It's free open-source software, works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It gives great balance for drawing on grids (reduces arbitrary decisions) and usability (power to draw what you want). I've gotten several compliments at talks for diagrams made using this software, so I highly recommend it.

I use it, too, and I wish it had LaTeX/Pstricks export. I used to use LatexDraw, but it's too limited.

According to one of the siblings [1], Dia can export to LaTeX. I haven't used it myself, but a ddg search yields a promising workflow [2]. Myself, I usually export it to SVG, which I then use Inkscape to convert to PDF and include it in the LaTeX file that way.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18789345 [2] http://lightonphiri.org/blog/latex-consistent-diagrams-using...

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

#155

Post by jimpudar »

tchaffee wrote: post #14

Having worked in a few IT architecture departments at huge companies the most popular tool by far at these companies really shocked me at first: PowerPoint. It's not that hard to build these things by hand using basic shapes. One of our diagrams was about 3 feet by 4 feet when printed and had thousands of elements and lines connecting those elements. Similarly now that I don't use Windows I've reverted to Google Slid…

There's a senior architect in my organization who makes the most incredible, beautiful diagrams I've ever seen. He just uses PowerPoint.

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

#157

Post by hashhar »

I personally feel that most of my use cases are covered by ASCII Flow (http://asciiflow.com/) or MermaidJS (https://mermaidjs.github.io/mermaid-live-editor/).

For everything else that cannot be covered by these two I break out my pen and paper and click a picture.

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

#159

Post by analognoise »

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.

I love Visio. Good job.

Is there a way I can interface C# to it easily? Basically I'd like to add some intelligence to a standard Visio document to almost make it a schematic capture system. Even if that isn't possible, keep up the good work!

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