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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?

#191

Post by ygra »

osrec wrote: post #107
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…

yEd is really great! I stumbled upon it while googling about 7 years ago, and it was awesome even then (and it comfortably beat visio). What's even more cool is their (newish) online version, which means you can do all the diagramming in the browser and even share it conveniently. Thank you to the creators of yEd - you've put together a wonderful product! If there is one feature I would like to see, it's the ability…

yWorks employee here, though not working on yEd. Thanks for the kind words.

As for your wish, I think that's already there. You can select many items at once and change them all in the same way, e.g. changing the label font. To select all elements of the same type, simply select one of them (e.g. a label (you may have to use Ctrl+click to select a label on top of a node)) and press Ctrl+A. That should select all labels, while not selecting anything else. From there you can change properties for all of them at once. I think we've added this to yEd Live (the online version) as well recently.

There is also a powerful selection dialog under Tools > Select elements where you can basically select everything that matches certain criteria, such as all nodes with the same color, or predecessors of the currently selected node. Afterwards you can change properties in the panel as usual. This one only exists in the desktop version, though.

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

#192

Post by ygra »

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.

yWorks employee here, though not working on yEd. As shezi noted, it's a demo for the capabilities of our commercial diagramming library. Said library handles displaying and editing graphs, automatic layout and analysis algorithms and yEd showcases all of those things to some extent. The library itself is quite customizable, though, so our customers often create applications for very specific diagrams and interactions with it.

I would assume, however, that the intersection between yEd users and yFiles licensees is fairly small, though. It still remains a good showcase for what developers could do with the library (along with the 100+ demo applications that ship with it [1]).

[1]: https://live.yworks.com/demos/

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

#193

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

How does that diagram even work on that link?

https://git-lfs.github.com/

It's a gif, but it becomes a static afterwards. I see no changes on the frontend whatsoever, no CSS property changes, no changes in image, etc. No canvas element etc. Refreshing the page, the gif stays static, but running it through a different browser replays gif animation.

I've never seen this done before, how does that work?

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

#194

Post by jgautsch »

swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #193

How does that diagram even work on that link? https://git-lfs.github.com/ It's a gif, but it becomes a static afterwards. I see no changes on the frontend whatsoever, no CSS property changes, no changes in image, etc. No canvas element etc. Refreshing the page, the gif stays static, but running it through a different browser replays gif animation. I've never seen this done before, how does that work?

I haven’t inspected it myself (I’m on mobile atm) but usually that kind of thing is an animated SVG. You can animate SVG nodes with CSS just like HTML

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

#195

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

jgautsch wrote: post #194
swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #193

How does that diagram even work on that link? https://git-lfs.github.com/ It's a gif, but it becomes a static afterwards. I see no changes on the frontend whatsoever, no CSS property changes, no changes in image, etc. No canvas element etc. Refreshing the page, the gif stays static, but running it through a different browser replays gif animation. I've never seen this done before, how does that work?

I haven’t inspected it myself (I’m on mobile atm) but usually that kind of thing is an animated SVG. You can animate SVG nodes with CSS just like HTML

True, but its just a gif file on the page. I can't seem to figure out how it stops the gif animation though. I've looked into this topic before, normally you apply a canvas element on top of it capturing one frame of the image. Or you can hotswap the image / gif at end of animation. But there's none here though, neither SVG or canvas.

It stops at the end of its animation here as well too, https://git-lfs.github.com/images/graphic.gif

I didn't see the answer on stackoverflow. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5818003/stop-a-gif-anima...

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

#196

Post by Hopka »

swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #193

How does that diagram even work on that link? https://git-lfs.github.com/ It's a gif, but it becomes a static afterwards. I see no changes on the frontend whatsoever, no CSS property changes, no changes in image, etc. No canvas element etc. Refreshing the page, the gif stays static, but running it through a different browser replays gif animation. I've never seen this done before, how does that work?

It is a feature of the GIF format. You can specify how often the animation shall loop or that it should loop forever.

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

#198

Post by webmaven »

swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #195
jgautsch wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t inspected it myself (I’m on mobile atm) but usually that kind of thing is an animated SVG. You can animate SVG nodes with CSS just like HTML

True, but its just a gif file on the page. I can't seem to figure out how it stops the gif animation though. I've looked into this topic before, normally you apply a canvas element on top of it capturing one frame of the image. Or you can hotswap the image / gif at end of animation. But there's none here though, neither SVG or canvas. It stops at the end of its animation here as well too, https://git-lfs.github.com/i…

Animated GIFs loop a specified number of times. The browser simply isn't re-running animations that have finished when the page reloads.

If you want to see it animate again, do shift-ctrl-r or shift-reload.

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

#199

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

Hopka wrote: post #196
swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #193

How does that diagram even work on that link? https://git-lfs.github.com/ It's a gif, but it becomes a static afterwards. I see no changes on the frontend whatsoever, no CSS property changes, no changes in image, etc. No canvas element etc. Refreshing the page, the gif stays static, but running it through a different browser replays gif animation. I've never seen this done before, how does that work?

It is a feature of the GIF format. You can specify how often the animation shall loop or that it should loop forever.

ah I didn't know GIFs could do that.

I found a tool online for changing number of loops, set the value to 1

https://ezgif.com/loop-count

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

#200

Post by rohn007 »

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.

Since you are on the team, puzzle me this. . The original creators sold out to MS back in the mid 2000's. Now MS calls it an "Office" product. . So why is Visio not included in ANY Office bundled offering? It is only sold as an overpriced standalone product, back to 1980's marketing! It strikes me as contrary to the key concept underlying Office! That is selling bundles of products cheaper than standalone competitors.

As this question shows, there are lots of free and low cost alternatives.

Visio (and Project) should be included in at least one Office bundle, ie Pro Plus.

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