Ask HN: How do you create diagrams in documentation?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143318

by ahtomski • 12 years ago

7 12 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

rsmaniak• 12 years ago

Gliffy(www.gliffy.com) works great for me.

bsaunder• 12 years ago

Inkscape

radq• 12 years ago

I use Dia: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia

fromdoon• 12 years ago

I had started with using MS Visio at my job. Though I had absolutely no experience in making diagrams, Visio was quite easy to get started and become comfortable in quick time.

The downside of course is that it is not free.

I would also like to know open source alternatives to MS Visio. I can see that Ubuntu 12.04 comes with Libre Draw, but I haven't tried it yet.

ahtomski2• 12 years ago

Have you tried UMlet? It's limited but great for nailing UML diagrams.

ahtomski2• 12 years ago

Yeah I quite like Gliffy. More often than not, we take photos of whiteboards and email them round the team.

phantom_oracle• 12 years ago

LibreOffice Draw is reasonable if you are coming from Linux.

Otherwise there is GIMP too.

+1 to all the other open source solutions mentioned here.

alok-g• 12 years ago

Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

Sometimes Excel when diagram could be made by drawing borders around cells and resizing rows and columns as per need. This helps when unplanned non-linear horizontal and vertical scaling is needed while making the diagram.

The SmartArt concept they introduced was quite promising, though I find the current state of it lagging. I am sad that it never picked up.

chatmasta• 12 years ago

Balsamiq

atsaloli• 12 years ago

Blockdiag

hnjake• 12 years ago

Give www.draw.io a go. I have used it a few times at work.

BraveNewCurency• 12 years ago

If you want a diagram you can embed in text and check into source control, take a look at GraphViz. http://www.graphviz.org/

You can even embed it in other things, like Wikis. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GraphViz

Ask HN: How do you create diagrams in documentation?

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