LAN Drawing

My oldest son swears by Visio, though I've not tried it myself.

...Jim Thompson

I would second Jim's recommendation of Visio. They had special templates just for network design, including a lot of different manufacturers hubs, routers, switches, etc. It's been a few years since I did my last network design, but I used Visio exclusively, and everyone was very complimentary of the final documentation.

Visio sucks for wiring diagrams.

My oldest son is a programmer and uses Visio for flow-chrting.

...Jim Thompson

package

using

available.

own template

I find

time and

Have a look at "SmartDraw" It has a full library of network symbols. However I have not used it for that purpose and can not comment on how good or bad it is.

I agree. It's rather tedious to use (I think it was designed for morons), but it gets the job done. We used it a lot for documentation where I used to work.

Leon

I use both Visio and SmartDraw. Mostly Visio because more customers would understand this format. SmartDraw seems to have more extensive library of symbols, especially in the physical infrastructure realm. So I sometimes end up drawing symbols (or meta symbols - collection of symbols) in SmartDraw and then convert them over to Visio for compatibility

I swear at Visio. I got a copy free when I bought my copy of SolidWorks (supposedly specifically for drawing schematics). It's miserable, I HATE it. I use my free copy of IntelliCAD instead and that is no love affair, but I don't have many schematics to draw. =========================================================================== Chris

Thanks, everyone, for your comments!

John Wood (Code 5550) e-mail: snipped-for-privacy@itd.nrl.navy.mil Naval Research Laboratory