Software for Making Company Diagrams?

gaudenz asks: "We have a network with Linux, Solaris, Mac and Windows and need a software to paint simple diagrams, such as used in deployment. The actual requirements are simple: The tool must export to postscript, support fonts, boxes with multiple lines of text, and connections between these boxes. We found Visio with VMWare to be the best solution, JGraphpad 5 looks promising, too. Since diagrams are a common thing in development companies I was hoping others have made a comparison, too, and may come up with some other ideas to solve this problem."

Comments

xfig

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.xfig.org/

LWN Strikes Again

[MBCook]

Once again, the great LWN has something to help you. Check out part 1 and part 2 of "The Grumpy Editor's Guide to diagram editors". I have no expiriance with any diagram software, so that's all that I can offer you.

FreeMind

[Markaci]

I played around with this. Not very useful for me, but it may work for you. It doesn't export to postscript, but it exports to HTML. :-\ Give it a look. http://freemind.sourceforge.net/

Damn, AC, you did beat me to that! ;-)

[PaulBu]

Also, Dia (should've come with your Linux distribution as part of GNOME) but I personally find xfig more "intuitive". ;-)

And modern XFig even has libraries of simbols for standard network/computer/rack/whatever equipment.

Paul B.

P.S. The best part is that the storage format is all plain-text ASCII, I've done a number of "Increase all font sizes to 14 pt" with sed and/or awk. ;-)

Kivio Works for me

[Kick the Donkey]

I use Kivio. Works well. And is relativly feature rich. I believe is supports most of what you're looking for.

Dia

[irenetheno]

I switched to Linux as my primary desktop a few months ago (chose Fedora Core 2).

Recently, I was creating an OpenOffice.org document and needed a couple of diagrams.. After
searching through the menu for a few moments, I came across Dia.

Dia fits all of the listed requirements from what I can tell. Its interface and features are very
similar to Visio IMO.. In addition, It loads much much faster than Visio.

I created two mini-network diagrams quite easily on my first use. I exported those to PNG
(EPS is available in a couple of formats) and inserted/scaled them into my document.

Overall, I was quite impressed.

Graphviz

[Polo]

You might want to look at graphviz:

http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz

I've used the mac os x port and found it will create graphs from possibly script-generated input files in a simple syntax.

Re:Graphviz

[fm6]

I got interested in Graphviz when I did a Tech Writing contract that required me to use Doxygen. One useful feature of Doxygen is that it can feed inheritance and dependency information to graphviz to create cool diagrams for your API manuals. Alas, Graphviz only knows how to connect nodes with simple arcs. That means you can't follow standard conventions for creating things like org charts. And even if you're not that picky, you need more contro over placement and line drawing if you're going to readable charts with more than a very few nodes.

When in doubt, always remember . .

[Amiasian]

On the OS X front, there's Omnigraffle. It exports to a wide variety of formats, PostScript included.
Also has the charting functions you'd be looking for.

Visual Thought

[Will Sargent]

Visual Thought is freeware. Works on Windows, Solaris, HP, and Linux (under Wine).