I've watched other people hand-craft Visio documents that go out of date really fast.
I've also watched developers try to use design tools for high-level sketch kind of diagrams and get bogged down with superfluous code-sync features.
I've also watched developers try to use design tools for high-level sketch kind of diagrams and get bogged down with superfluous code-sync features.
When I want to illustrate a point, just plain old boxes and arrows work wonders. Especially when I can commit the source and be able to tweak it afterwards.
I've found that dot meets and exceeds the my common use goals. I would guess that 80% of the time, the diagram communicates what I want to say without any tweaking at all. About 15% of the time, it takes some layout/shape/font/color tweaking to get the message across in a clear & direct manner. About 5% of the time, I have to output the graph as SVG and load it into Inkscape for further slight tweaking.
Here are some especially helpful links:
- official site
- gallery of examples, also
- up-to-date language reference, and other documentation
- outdated, but very well-organized Users Guide
- dot-functions.sh
The last piece of software is intended as a helper for invoking dot quickly from the command line as part of a REPL authoring flow.
To use dot-functions.sh, first download it. The script defines a bash function that can be used from a bash CLI. Source it into the current shell by doing: source dot-functions.sh, followed by dot somefile.dot.
Here is the source of dot-functions.sh:
Here is the source of dot-functions.sh:
Another very helpful article was written on this topic by Diomidis Spinellis. Now that I think about it, there is another very helpful article about how to get a hand-written sketch into digital form.