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I want arrows with different size arrowheads, lines that stay attached to objects as you move them, and the ability to make them curved / bendy or straight. That's it.

Try Xfig then. It's not much maintained anymore, but it's the easiest piece of software I found to draw networks. It supports all what you described above. It supports user libraries and I regularly import Cisco's free icons into it. Its numerous exports (among which EPS, PDF and PNG) make the result cleanly integrable in virtually anything (including Word). Also, it makes efficient use of the mouse's 3 buttons and keyboard so that you don't waste your time clicking 20 times a minute on the same tool to perform the same action like in visio.

Its real weak point is text support. It supports text lines, but not text areas. This means that if you want to change a multi-line comment, you may end up modifying multiple lines.

Willy

Two years of using Latex(VIM http://vim.org/+LAtexsuite http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net/ +freemindhttp://freemind.sourceforge.net/+freemind accessorieshttp://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/in dex.php/Accessories+xfig http://www.xfig.org/ cover most of my documentation needs) , and I love it, but in situations where MSoffice users are predominant I wouldnt recomment it. In an office environment where people have their own axe to grind suggesting any "radically different" method can be suicidal.

my favorite one (still today...):

http://bourbon.usc.edu:8001/tgif/

and you did mention clones of xfig, but not the original:

http://www.xfig.org/

http://www.xfig.org/

For me, the best feature of gnuplot was the pslatex terminal, which allows you to let LaTeX take care of typesetting the labels, legends and so forth, making the graph you include look much more integrated into your document than including just a plain .eps exported from some other software. Apparently there is now also an epslatex terminal, and I would be interested to find out what benefits using this instead has.

On a side note, xfig allows the creation of simple diagrams with LaTeX formatted captions. Together, these programs take care of making the prettiest figures in your document, though I'd like to know about any other software that produces split PostScript/LaTeX files.

And, if you don't know what xfig is, a) shame on you, b) here is a link.

A good Flash-based lines-and-boxes program, like early Visio, would be valuable.

What's wrong with xfig?

Not flash, but definitely a good and useful vector-based drawing program.

most people use a standard paint package people who want more do it with visio (why do you think MS took it over ?)

people round here have been useing Xfig for a LONG time and can import the drawings into ANYTHING (most packages have xfig filters if not PostScript is your friend) being able to import it helps alot

yes Gnome has Dia and KDE has viso knockoff but realy Xfig might look clunky but its packed full of features that networking people have been useing for YEARS not a couple of mounths and ALOT of books diagrams have been done in xfig

so my recomendation is you guessed http://www.xfig.org/

regards

john

Knuth uses postscript for figures? What a hypocrite. I stick to pure [la]tex for my figures with eepic (by way of xfig).

There's always good old xfig, but if that's too primitive for ya, try sketch.

2-3 years ago, I was facing this difficult choice for writing my thesis: LyX wasn't quite there yet, staroffice (still from stardiv at the time) looked good but wasn't quite there yet either, and everybody else in the lab (99.9% of the people) were complaining about all kinds of problems in office97, or from migration to one system to another (one guy managed to go nearly all the way through from 2 to 2000, but it took him a lot longer than anybody else to get his PhD ;)...

WYSIWIG is great for short documents... something you manage to write in a few minutes and can still handle the layout of.

Anything bigger than a few pages, a few dozens of cross-references to sections, equations, figures, citations and word pukes. It doesn't do it straight away, though... but slowly at first and giving-up more and more errors as the document grows.
Then when you want to print to another printer that isn't the one you wrote your document for, the layout and page breaks go all over the place. This Isn't Normal.

I remember having had this discussion on /. at the time and several people advised me to move to LaTeX.

Sure I was shit scared to do anything the size of a thesis in TeX... need to compiling documents before you can see them, limited xdvi viewer, no spell checker... all in all LaTeX isn't very appealing for the new user.

But think about it this way: A 200page document is quite a big project. If it were a big programming project, would you rather rely on a limited point and click tool somebody who doesn't understand shit about the stuff you're really doing, or would you rather do it yourself with a powerful language like c, c++... insert your favorite language here.

There you go! and you don't expect the learning curve to be easy either, do you?

So yes, it was quite a difficult move for me, but fortunately, there are good documents on the net... just grab a copy of epslatex.pdf from a CTAN mirror and The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e.

The most amazing thing about LaTeX is very simple: It's Open. This means that any part of your document, you can generate yourself from your programs. Need to generate a table with figures? just do it.

The same thing goes to two other programs I extensively used: grace and xfig. Yes they have somewhat limited interfaces, but you can generate the data from your own programs, so who cares about the interface?! they have open and well documented formats, it's the only thing that should matter.

For spell checking, I used aspell, again, who cares about real-time error correcting when you can do it in one go near the end?

For the editor, I don't know what you usually use, I use vi (improved :) and it works great. Use whatever you want.

Okay, I probably should stop being a LaTeX zealot, just think about it. Okay, you wouldn't start writing c++ code to just rename a few files... that's why bash is here for. The same way, to quickly produce a dirty document, wysiwyg is handy... but anything bigger than a few lines of code and you'll start to feel limited if you stay in bash instead of going for c/c++... same with documents... And when the program you're using is Trully Open, then you don't depend on The Big Corps who don't give a shit about you, just your money...

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College students need to write reports, create lab reports (embedding charts, diagrams, etc) and other larger projects.

In science and mathemetics, at least, this is usually accomplished with LaTeX. Diagrams are done with any tool that can generate EPS, like xfig or Graphviz. MS Word's equation editor sucks quite badly.

And there's a big difference between "you can embed diagrams" and "you can catch a virus". Yes, an exploit here or there is understandable. MS has made it quite clear that they're either clueless or careless when it comes to security, considering the sheer number and severity of exploits in their products. And their excuse that "there is no evidence that such activities are occurring" is even more unsettling. It reveals a whole attitude towards security akin to "the bank vault is secure until someone steals all the money".

what Linux really needs is a vector graphics tool that outputs to the Web

The XFIG Drawing Program for X Window System

I am not affiliated, etc....