Diagram drawing tools?

[entrochan]

I feel like I really ought to know this at this point in my career, but I don't appear to. And asking LazyJ is a lot more enjoyable than googling and trying to figure out what the hell might actually be good

Comments

[wotw]

I am reasonably happy with SmartDraw. It has a couple of
very annoying features, but they're not annoyinig enough to
inspire me to look for a substitute. It certainly does all
of the things you've said you want it to do, and, except
for overcoming those few annoying features, it is extremely
easy to use and easy to learn.

[agnosticoracle]

Visio is the Micro$oft tool for such things. Most places I've work already owned it so I never really looked any farther. It meets my diagramming needs.

[imvfd]

What exactly are you trying to do? Create a flow chart? Make comments on top of, say, screen caps, where the arrows just point to some part and a box attached to it say "This is where user finds out how many greebles are available"? Something else?

[entrochan]

Well, what I'm trying to do *right now* is take this picture: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn.intro.whatis.html#svn.intro.architecture and annotate it to show the parts we're actually using.

In general, what I'm looking for is something that's a little more sophisticated than MSWord's image editor (Yes, that's what I've been using to the extent that I do diagrams. Your mom.) to do diagrams for code documentation.

[imvfd]

Thanks. I'll ask the folks over at CS interface design what sort of stuff is good for this.

[entrochan]

Cool! Thank you! :)

[concrete]

People I know use Microsoft Visio, or the freeware Dia for Windows.

[motive_nuance]

Visio is a good professional-level tool for this, but I sometimes make diagrams that have the characteristics you named (shapes, ability to attach arrows to shapes, align/distribute/group shapes, backgrounds and transparency) in PowerPoint. If you're going to be doing this a lot, then something more robust like Visio would be much better, but for occasional use, ppt is easy to use, and I can show you how to use it to do this kind of thing.

[winterborne]

Agreed on both fronts.

[entrochan]

Ooh! Yeah! *That's* what I have the vague memory trace of. I've totally done this sort of thing in PowerPoint before, I just couldn't place it.