Writing Diagrams

One of the reasons I don’t tend to use many diagrams in the OUseful.info blog is that I’ve always been mindful that the diagrams I do draw rarely turn out how I wanted them to (the process of converting a mind’s eye vision to a well executed drawing always fails somewhere along the line, I imagine in part because I’ve never really put the time into practising drawing, even with image editors and drawing packages etc etc.)

Which is one reason why I’m always on the lookout for tools that let me write the diagram (e.g. Scripting Diagrams).

So for example, I’m very fond of Graphviz, which I can use to create network diagrams/graphs from a simple textual description of the graph (or a description of the graph that has been generated algorithmically…).

Out of preference, I tend to use Mac version of Graphviz, although the appearance of a canvas/browser version of graphviz is really appealing… (I did put in a soft request for a Drupal module that would generate a Graphviz plot from a URL that pointed to a dot file, but I’m not sure it went anywhere, and the canvas version looks far more interesting anyway…)

Hmmm – it seems there’s an iPhone/iPod touch Graphviz app too – Instaviz:

Another handy text2image service is the rather wonderful Web sequence diagrams, a service that lets you write out a UML sequence diagram:

There’s an API, too, that lets you write a sequence diagram within a <pre> tag in an HTML page, and a javascript routine will then progressively enhance it and provide you with the diagrammatic version, a bit like MathTran, or the Google Chart API etc etc (RESTful Image Generation – When Text Just Won’t Do).

If graphs or sequence diagrams aren’t your thing, here’s a handy hierarchical mindmap generator: Text2Mindmap:

And finally, if you do have to resort to actually drawing diagrams yourself, there are a few tools out there that look promising: for example, the LucidChart flow chart tool crossed my feedreader the other day. More personally, since Gliffy tried to start charging me at some point during last year, I’ve been using the Project Draw Autodesk online editor on quite a regular basis.

PS Online scripting tool for UML diagrams: YUML