Favorite Block Diagram software?

Xfig.

Visio

-- Dan Hollands

NO.

What's your alternative, Jeff? I wrote the message you were responding to in the link you provide; my alternative for schematics is Mentor Graphics, which is far less useful than Visio for presentation schematics, despite the problems with Visio.

But the OP wasn't asking about schematics, he was asking about block diagrams. For those, I find that Visio is generally a fine tool.

-- Mike --

I use the drawing tool that comes with OpenOffice.org

Nearly all the block diagrams in my various papers on my website used OOo tools -- including Draw to generate the block diagrams. Graphs were either done with MathCad or SciLab (another good free tool --

I made an EAGLE library called BLOCK.LBR. . .

My schematic capture app has done what little block diagram work I needed. . .

As you noted in the old post, perhaps if you get everything positioned right the first time. With Cisio having no real understanding of *connections* in the electrical sense (everything is just a *line* to Visio), there is a lot of rework to do every time you move something (no rubberbanding; it snaps where it wants--and it is clueless).

For a lot of stuff Open Office's Draw is the easiest way to go because it mixes with text in their Write program easily.

I sometimes also use the schematic program. The blocks in the block diagrams are sheets.

A very old version of Protel for Windows used to be quite good, running on Win95 back then. If I needed to paste readable schematics into a word document and if I wanted it to be quicker than drawing it with a stencil and ink pen, then this is the only program I have found so far that I would recommend. It is also much better than any microsoft program for doing flowcharts, powerpoint diagrams or stuff like that.

Chris

Edge Diagrammer from

Does lots of nice stuff - rubber banding of connected blocks, free mix of text and graphics, hyperlinks to other diagrams, etc.

Yes please,

I think visio suckis. I use Micrografx Designer for block diagrams and Micrografx Flowcharter 7, which have not been released in a while but are quite good. I evalutated the Corel tool that follows this (Corel bought Micrografx) but is not as good. I have to find new tool as well and am looking at Draw program in Open Office, I did some FSM diagrams in OO Draw and in my opinion it is worth checking out.

-SGS

Also have a look at

JohnS