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/

Re:xfig

[jgrahn]

Or, if you want diagrams with source code, use pic(1) and let troff render to Postscript. Or grap(1) - another bizarre troff preprocessor from the ancient past.

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. ;-)

Closest to Visio at the moment..

[rusty0101]

under Linux is Dia.

I am not claiming it is a great app. I happen to think it needs a lot of work. However for a quick drawing, to do flow chart type work, you should find it viable.

Good luck.

-Rusty

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).

Company diagrams?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I was going to say that I knew of none that included libraries with such important symbols as "Man with head inserted in anus" and "The whipmaster". However, it seems you only need an application that has computer and network symbols, so you have your pick of several.

Of course, they won't be able to do managerial or organizational charts...

Postscript.

[op00to]

Be a real man and hand-code your own postscript graphics. It's really not that difficult. Really.

Re:huh?

[n0d3]

Concidering that VMWare is a few hundrerd and Office with Visio, I would say a native Linux app could save you on some VMWare costs, and a free app. even more?

Besides, if you are using Linux and all, it would be easyer and nice to have a good native app, a lot of overhead and so, then again, nobody cares about efficiency and such anymore, we'll just get a new CPU + ram right?

Re: company diagrams

[gnu-generation-one]

"The tool must export to postscript, support fonts, boxes with multiple lines of text, and connections between these boxes."

OpenOffice Draw is so perfect for this job that it's not even an interesting question. Imagine something like Visio, but better, Free, and native to linux. Doesn't crash like Dia, easier to use, more versatile, and handles all the "linked boxes with translucent backgrounds and text some of which is in different colours or styles" that you'll ever need.

I assume that "print to file" generates some sort of postscript output, but it certainly supports saving as PDF, in addition to bitmap output options. You do know that ImageMagick makes it trivial to convert between images, PS, and PDF from the command-line?

ConceptDraw

[tin foil hat dude]

ConceptDraw is an Awesome piece of software that I have used for flow charts, cubicle diagrams and some huge charts that were 14 ft. x 6 ft. and had about 80,000 data points.