Ask HN: How do you create diagrams in documentation?

7 points by ahtomski ↗ HN

12 comments

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

Have you tried UMlet? It's limited but great for nailing UML diagrams.
Yeah I quite like Gliffy. More often than not, we take photos of whiteboards and email them round the team.
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.

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.

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