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Ask HN: What do you use to create diagrams?

61 points ttd | 1 comments | 12 Mar 25 14:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.217s | source

I've been working on a diagramming tool [1] and wanted to get some thoughts from people who regularly make architecture and other technical diagrams. I know my own experiences but I'm quite curious to hear others.

I'm guessing for a lot of people draw.io and Excalidraw are probably the go-to. If you use draw.io (or something else), what do you like about it, or what do you wish was better?

[1] - https://app.vexlio.com/ for the curious

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ajkjk ◴[12 Mar 25 14:31 UTC] No.43343665[source]▶
Semi, aside, but I'm desperate for a better way to make math diagrams (WYSIWYG style, not TeX). I asked about this a while ago and nothing is really doing it for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38351370. Although since then I have heard about https://penrose.cs.cmu.edu/ as well. Right now I use Excalidraw because there's a fork (never landed... ugh) which supports TeX in labels. But its actual drawing tools are quite limited, not to mention janky. There are some other options not mentioned in that thread which I've found in since then, but I still haven't seen anything satisfactory.

If you made math stuff easy to draw I'd use your tool in a heartbeat. Unfortunately there's probably not a large market for that sort of thing.

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lr1970 ◴[13 Mar 25 12:53 UTC] No.43352795[source]▶
Obsidian has an excalidraw plugin that supports LaTeX both math and text. Then you can export your final diagram in many formats (pdf, svg, png, jpg).
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1. ajkjk ◴[13 Mar 25 21:28 UTC] No.43357384[source]▶
I'm aware, but excalidraw is fairly underpowered for diagramming. It can do TeX but very little in the way of actual figures without a lot of finicky manual effort.