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Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
211–218 of 218 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#212For 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've switched to Affinity Designer recently and have been pleasantly surprised. There's some really bad and clunky Adobe UI in Illustrator which affinity improves on. There's only been one or two thing's I've missed from Illustrator that are in their feature pipeline so hopefully they'll be coming soon.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#213I'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…
This represents my exact experience with diagramming programs. Over the past five years, I setup a virtual machine just to run Visio, at least 5 times.
Draw.io could be so much better but it is exhausting to create anything with it.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#214I'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 release a full client for macOS :)
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#215I 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.
Dia does have a capability to export to PStricks. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/dia/tree/master/plug-ins/pstr...
Even better, it has export to PGF/TiKZ : see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/dia/tree/master/plug-ins/pgf
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#216I 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.
One thing I've noticed with Dia is that it simply doesn't launch for me. Does Dia require X11 on a Mac? If so, I couldn't find anything in the documentation stating this (although not launching on Windows is covered).
Likewise I'm a bit leery that Dia is requesting access to "system events".
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#217I 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.
One thing I've noticed with Dia is that it simply doesn't launch for me. Does Dia require X11 on a Mac? If so, I couldn't find anything in the documentation stating this (although not launching on Windows is covered). Likewise I'm a bit leery that Dia is requesting access to "system events".
Yes, I believe it requires X11 on Mac. I use XQuartz. Getting it to run the very first time may be a bit challenging, but it's worth it.
Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I've noticed with Dia is that it simply doesn't launch for me. Does Dia require X11 on a Mac? If so, I couldn't find anything in the documentation stating this (although not launching on Windows is covered). Likewise I'm a bit leery that Dia is requesting access to "system events".
Yes, I believe it requires X11 on Mac. I use XQuartz. Getting it to run the very first time may be a bit challenging, but it's worth it.
Well it's bailing right now because of an rpath issue (which looks like it's been an issue for a few years now). Which is to say that this isn't really very encouraging for dia on OSX.