Tikz
Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
171–180 of 218 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#172(expecting a lot of hate...)
Microsoft Visio.
It's as flexible as possible without sacrificing too much usability; you can create any sort of diagrams I can think of, from simple flowcharts to complex sequence diagrams or process illustrations.
The main caveat is it's a commercial tool. I have it available at work as most of my clients (to the point there's usually a preference for it).
That said, on many specific cases I use other tools, like plantUML for generating more in depth sequence diagrams, and I prefer to stick to simple PowerPoint figures if I'm doing something that is very abstract - mainly because of its broad adoption; Most people will have a PowerPoint compatible tool installed at their computer and thus readily able to collaborate with me.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#173Earlier 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…
I've successfully used lucidcharts.com to import, edit & re-export back to Visio.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#174LaTex + Tikz is very helpful for paper work, and viso is very useful tool to draw professional diagrams, and mindmanager and xmind are mind map tool, they can be used to draw some beautiful mind diagrams.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it's just because I haven't invested the time to learn it properly, but the one time I was forced to use Visio instead of my go-to, Dia, for a diagram I found it excruciating. Specifically I recall not being able to work out how to make it let the diagram be arbitrarily large instead of forcing me to cram it onto a single page.
As someone who went out and bought a license and used it frequently for figures in grant proposals and other documents, Visio is excruciating. It's not even much of a learning curve, it's just frustrating and feels like you're fighting it. This is because I was using Visio where the final product needs to look aesthetically perfect, and the workflow would get you to 95%. But we all know how much manual tweaking it ta…
It’s an unusual, red-headed stepchild product.
Personally, it’s unusual in that it’s an acquired product that’s sort of an Office component and it has gotten worse with every release until very recently. Even Outlook, while awful, gets better.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#176Microsoft Paint.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#177Nowadays I do all my diagrams in Figma. Its a ui tool first but its so flexible it just works for any use case. And it has a strong component functionality so once you build a library of "blocks" for you use cases it's trivial to creatr alternate diagrams.
For those dismissing figma cause its a ui tool.. I'm a dev first but did a short course on ux/ui and got introduced to it. 15 min you tube tutorial was all was needed to get it and they have a Web app that works on all oses.
Try it
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#178If you want to spend hours or days handcrafting and tuning, there are plenty of options, but for quickly making diagrams that still look good (and can be fine-tuned to look even better) I find Visio hard to beat. It's Windows only and costs money, but it is well worth the money.
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.
What drives me absolute bananas is the way they changed licensing for Visio. You could get the database reverse-engineering feature (Pro version) for a fixed, one-off price up to some point. Now it's all subscriptions. Blah.
(great software though, I have to admit)
As for the main topic, my favourite diagramming tool is GraphViz, mostly because it is easy to script / automate, does a great job auto-placing things, handles large diagrams quite nicely and works on any OS.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#179Microsoft Paint.
Notepad.exe !
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#180I love using Mermaid https://mermaidjs.github.io/ There’s an online editor too which is basically what I use most of the time.
I use Mermaid as an extension in MediaWiki and can generate graphs from the structured data in my wiki, pretty slick.
There are some tweaks that would be really nice to make it more useful (designating two nodes to be on the same level, more control over node positioning, etc.), but I'm enjoying it so far.