Diagraming Tools

An important part of any paper, presentation, or poster is the associated figures and diagrams.

While there are numerous tools to create graphs and charts from numerical data (and I’ve already professed my current love of scipy) the creation of graphs that aren’t based on data is pretty important too.

PowerPoint is probably the most commonly used tool to accomplish this goal. It’s dead simple to use, pretty much everyone knows it, and you can create images of pretty damn good quality.

PowerPoint, however, is is a presentation tool, and weaknesses start to show up when you want to do fancier things. Auto shapes are great, and there are connectors and what not, but, at least for the version I use (PowerPoint:mac 2004) there is a lot left to be desired. A really simple example that bugs the hell out of me quite often is alignment. Yes, there is snap to, and yes you can have a grid overlayed, but what if you want to do something like ensure that two elements on either side of a middle element are the same distance apart from that element?

If there is an easy way to do that, I don’t know what it is…

However, for OS X there is a sweet app called OmniGraffle.

For the example above, OmniGraffle does neat stuff like:

See how it shows you when your two elements have the same horizontal distance from the middle element? That’s pretty cool…

OmniGraffle has a lot of other neat features, and the diagrams it creates look pretty slick right out of the box.

Here is a diagram I made with OmniGraffle giving a birds eye view of what a BitTorrent swarm looks like. I think it turned out pretty nice and creating it in PowerPoint would have been extremely difficult.

I’m sure that there are other applications out there for Windows, Mac, and Unix alike that would produce the same quality of diagram, but the ones I can think of off the top of my head (Photoshop, Gimp, and Visio) are generally designed for another purpose, with perhaps Visio as the exception. (But my dislike for Visio could span multiple posts )