The Grumpy Editor's guide to diagram editors [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to diagram editors

Posted May 5, 2004 1:10 UTC (Wed) by vblum (guest, #1151)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to diagram editors

This is an excellent topic for a review, and a nice overview. Yet, it is disappointing that the problem of drawing simple diagrams in OSS is still somewhat unsolved. I retry a number of different applications from time to time, but the sad fact is:

Plain ASCII postscript, emacs + a viewer beat them all hands down. It's no good for painting (art), but sure does the job for diagrams.

OpenOffice Draw seemed reasonable, but it has a severe font bug that produces lots of bogus stuff instead of text when you mix two fonts and export to eps.

xfig is nice and capable, but the UI is a bit unwieldy.

Naive question: Wasn't there something called Kivio, once upon a time? What did that do?

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Kivio

Posted May 5, 2004 2:20 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

Kivio is the KDE answer to Visio -- a vector diagram editor rather than a
vector drawing program like Illustrator and Kontour (dunno about
Karbon14).

Kivio probably would fit well in this lineup.

Kivio: not as good as dia?

Posted May 5, 2004 3:40 UTC (Wed) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]

Dia seemed much better than kivio last I looked, and a casual glance didn't reveal any advantages (unless you strongly prefer kde widgets over gtk). I haven't spent much time with kivio though; can anyone give a reason to use kivio rather than dia? E.g. is it good for importing & exporting, or printing or something?

Kivio: not as good as dia?

Posted May 6, 2004 8:37 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I find Kivio quite a bit easier to use than Dia -- especially with the
version currently in the KOffice cvs, which is polished and has a large
selection of stencil shapes, including all Dia's stencils. I use it for my
UML diagramming, my wife uses it to visualize the relations and plots in
her novels.

You can export your drawing to most bitmap file formats by choosing
Page/Export Page -- the File/Export only exports to native or Oasis
format, because Kivio can group drawings in one document.

Kivio

Posted May 5, 2004 3:21 UTC (Wed) by busterb (subscriber, #560) [Link]

Kivio is still around, part of the KOffice suite. It is a more dedicated
chart and diagram tool, and is not so good for general drawing. It
supports:

* Layers and object grouping
* Grids, snapping and general alignment
* An extensive stencil set (more stencils can be found in the Kompany's
commercial version Kivio mp, though the free version has quite a few)
* A few general tools; poly and straight connectors that stretch with
connected objects, support captions, width, arrowheads, text
* Kivio mp has a few more drawing tools, like bezier curves, circles and
rectangles. The only real shapes you can draw in the free Kivio are
predefined stencils.
* free Kivio can write PS and PDF (actually, any KDE app can; look at
the PDF printer), but doesn't appear to write anything else. I guess you
could take a screenshot of print preview to get a PNG or such. Kivio mp
presumably can export more formats.

Google around and try them out. Kivio seems more useful for this task
than Karbon14.

For drawing, you might also look at KPresenter; a lot of people at my
work tend to use Powerpoint as a general diagramming and drawing tool, so
why not KPresenter. It at least exports to graphic formats and has a lot
more drawing tools than even Kivio. Actually, it is interesting that
different components of KOffice don't share drawing tools.

Kivio and theKompany

Posted May 6, 2004 6:03 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

* Kivio mp has a few more drawing tools, like bezier curves, circles and rectangles. The only real shapes you can draw in the free Kivio are predefined stencils.

As long as such important features are held back for the pay version, Kivio will never go very far. I don't mind the extra stencils being held back, but drawing tools? That sort of thing from theKompany makes even Ximian's Microsoft envy look good.

Kivio and theKompany

Posted May 6, 2004 7:51 UTC (Thu) by cloose (subscriber, #5066) [Link]

AFAIK theKompany has nothing to do with the KOffice version of Kivio. They don't hold anything back and they don't work on it.

BTW Peter Simonsson and Nicolas Goutte did a lot of work lately. So I'm sure Kivio will improve.