Ask HN: What offline tool do you use for design diagrams

2 points by winteriscoming 9y ago ↗ HN

Often, I have found a need to draw something to explain what I have in my mind as a high level design for a particular software. I don't really mean in the UML diagram kind of sense, but just boxes, connections between them etc..., some simple ones but at the same time crisp and clean looking ones, which I can present either as images or in slides.

The best thing so far for me has been drawing something on a paper and then taking a picture of it and sharing. It has worked most of the times, but at times trying to put together something that fits within a paper's size and then making any notes in there clearly visible in the image has been difficult.

I have tried a few online tools too. Tools that require you to create the diagram online or tools that require you to have a specific browser plugin for them to work.

Does anyone here use any offline tool which is just a native application and is easy to use for such free from diagrams? I'm on Linux and have tried gimp but I haven't felt productive with it for such uses.

5 comments

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CarolineW 9y ago ↗

I've used DOT and then used LibreOffice Impress to overlay text on the resulting image. It's not fast, not fully automated, but after a little practice I find it fast and effective to produce clean, one-off diagrams.

DOT could be used with more annotations than I use, getting the base diagram and then annotating it "by hand" seems fastest.

brudgers 9y ago ↗

I've used Dot [1] too.

Ditaa [2] is also useful for anyone into Emacs Org-mode.

Racket's Pict language [3] provides functional pictures and it's also an alternative.

[1]: http://www.graphviz.org/

[2]: http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/

[3]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/pict/index.html

detaro 9y ago ↗

maybe yed is something for you: https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

Inkscape is THE open-source vector editor and probably better suited than GIMP. Also useful to retouch/modify vectors graphics created with other tools, e.g. yed or LibreOffice

winteriscoming 9y ago ↗

Thanks, that looks promising. Downloaded and tried it a couple of times, am going to try it out a while longer and see how it goes.

jschwartzi 9y ago ↗

In the past I've set up Windows in a VM to run Visio. Their default UML glyphs require a ton of fidgeting to put together, but there are some good third-party glyphs that don't require you to program your diagrams.

For online tools I've used Lucidchart most extensively, and I much prefer it to Visio.