Which tool do you use to draw simple diagrams/pictures to illustrate a technical point?

Which tool do you use to draw simple diagrams/pictures to illustrate a technical point in a document?

From stackoverflow

• .

  One of these, usually the black one:

  

  Use the red one for emphasis - it really works well.

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  EDIT: This was, of course, meant to be tongue-in-cheek (although most of my "technical documents" really are on the whiteboard).

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  EDIT(ORIAL): Wouldn't you know it, I hit the 200-points-per-day ceiling before answering this? ARGH!!! That limit, by the way, is pretty asinine IMO. :P

  : What if you have to illustrate it over the internet?

  : What if I want to put it in a blog?

  Jason Bunting : Use Paint.NET and draw on the image....

  Chris Bunch : I'd say use the webcam to record it as a presentation, and then upload it to YouTube and link it in your blog.

  Sam Hasler : strange, I unvoted you and then re-upvoted, and you went up by 10 points. I'm guessing I voted yesterday after you reached the limit.

  Joseph : Do not be one of those people that writes "DO NOT ERASE" and leaves the board full for days.

  Thomas Owens : @Joseph I hate those people too. @ke42 A digital camera (or even a cell phone camera) goes a long way.

• I personally love OmniGraffle, but you may want to check out this thread for other suggestions. Although it's all UML software, most of them can draw pretty diagrams and pictures.

• OmniGraffle on OS X

  http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/

  Or, the whitebaord :)

  DGentry : Omnigraffle rocks.

• If you're on Windows, with the office suite, I would use Visio. If you're on linux and no money, xfig.

  Other than that, most Office packages have some kind of drawing tool, you can for example do basic vector drawings in MS Word.

• Haven't found anything that comes close to Microsoft's Visio (in a Windows environment)...

• Depending on the document, I've used PowerPoint, Paint.NET, and Inkscape.

• Mostly whiteboard for simple explanations and design brainstorming maybe coupled with a cell phone camera if I want to save it.

  For some things Inkscape is great and fun to use though there's a learning curve. Maybe google's version of powerpoint.

  I've yet to find a UML sketching program that I enjoy using, I've tried ArgoUML and found it confusing and clunky (jvm - ugh) and CadifraUML which seemed to just have too few options.

• I use Visio almost exclusively for this, but Visio can easily become the programmer's version of PowerPoint if you let it.

  My boss used Mind Maps for this sort of thing, which worked well below a certain level of complexity when they became too burdensome.

• Pencil and paper.

  spoulson : Sometimes the low-tech approach is best... :)

• http://www.graphviz.org/ turns a source-code like description into a diagram. It's quite easy to generate the code it needs from a database, or whatever other source you have.

  Randomly I double clicked on a graphviz file on my Mac and it loaded into OmniGraffle which drew the same diagram that graphviz would have done, except that I could edit it. Anyway, it's a useful tool for drawing diagrams from machine sources.

• PowerPoint now has (many of) the Visio objects, so I just use that.

• For a simple diagram in a document, I use OpenOffice Draw.

  1. It's free.
  2. It's reasonably simple in terms of user interface.
  3. It's fairly lightweight in terms of memory and disk footprint.
  4. It runs on the platforms that I use for software development and writing documents about said development (i.e., Windows and several flavors of Linux).
  5. It exports the document and image formats that I use regularly (i.e., JPEG and PDF).
  6. It's free (see point 1).

• For free-form drawing on a screen use a tablet PC or a Wacom tablet. Microsoft OneNote is great with tablets (recognizes handwriting).

• Electronic white board You're only limited by your hand-eye coordination, then you save the drawing as an image file.

• aiSee or GIMP.

• Yed graph editing app has helped a lot where i work.

  Using Java QuicklLaunch it's always ready to go :)

• Good old Windows Paint. There are lots of things you can do with it that might not be obvious.