Simple technical illustration software/tools?

[forrestc]

I'm struggling to find the right tool - I'm guessing it probably doesn't exist all in one tool but it doesn't hurt to ask.

I need to draw some semi-technical drawings on a fairly regular basis. These are the types of drawings you'd see in a user manual or online as part of a guide on how to do something. Quite often, they're wiring diagrams or other diagrams showing how to do something slightly mechanical, etc.   Most are for teaching and/or assembly instruction type purposes.

I've tried a lot of tools, and had started describing what I liked about each, but instead maybe I should just put what I'd like into a list, so here goes:

• Ability to paste clipart or other images
• Text tool optimized for adding text to images.  For example, being able to place a contrasting 'outline' in order to make the text stand out from the image
• Various easy to use 'callout' tools.  I.E. arrows and balloons.    I'm not talking about clipart of these elements - actually being able to draw a callout of a few styles is needed
• Line tool which is optimized for connecting two points on two objects.  i.e. I want to draw a line between two connector pins and have it look like a wire instead of a square line with poorly-connected corners.   It's amazing how many tools let you draw lines, but don't make it easy to "connect" two objects with a line, or worse, think a bezier curve is the solution for anything curvy.
• Useful coloring options for lines - for example, I need to be able to represent wires that are 'white with green stripes'.  I don't care if it's alternating white/green dashes with a black outline, or if they're angled or something else, but I do need to be able to represent them
• Visually good looking results from above.   Don't want horrible text rendering, want my callouts to be visually nice as well.  This means that the software probably is a bit 'graphically opinionated'.  I can live with someone else's design choices here as long as the result is usable

I'm sure I've left some things off, but I think this gives at least the gist of what I'm looking for - a simple way to markup or draw images which are of the type that you need to draw to explain some technical concept to someone else in electricity/electronics, but without resorting to full-blown CAD software or doing a schematic (that a lot of people can't read anyways).

Some things I've tried:  Snagit editor hits most of the points here, but their line tool is atrocious.   Smartdraw has a good line tool (except alternating color options), but is pretty dismal everywhere else.   Visio is just a PITA licensing wise and it isn't really what I'm looking for.  I've tried various CAD packages, but that's CAD and either you spend a lot of time doing 3D or you end up with a mechanical drawing which isn't the goal here.  Photoshop and similar tools are too feature rich (but they're great if you want to do it all by hand).  I could go on, but I won't.

So, anyone have a quick drawing tool they like which allows them to produce good looking drawings without a lot of work?

[Alex Eisenhut]

I would say Libre Office Draw but it's a huge install and slow and lumbering, but does get you a drawing package that I think might do the job

[NiHaoMike]

Have you tried Dia or Inkscape?

[CatalinaWOW]

PowerPoint was what I used before I retired.  In corporate environments licensing isn't an issue. It checks most of your boxes, but is weak on the connecting line feature.   I have little experience with LibreOffice Draw but it should come close.  Recent releases of LibreOffice are not as slow and clunky as earlier versions.

Both these programs are relatively easily accessible by the recipients of your material, a big advantage over the more specialized stuff out there.

[jonpaul]

We used old JASC Paintshop Pro 7

  free  ... decades old.

http://www.oldversion.com/windows/paint-shop-pro-7-0

 

Jon

[SiliconWizard]

These days I use a mix of tools depending on what exactly I want to illustrate. yEd is my go-to tool for block diagrams: http://www.yworks.com/products/yed
You can insert images. But it's a diagramming tool at heart, so there are benefits and constraints that go with that.

Otherwise, for something more flexible, Inkscape is good: https://inkscape.org/

For block diagrams that can be generated from a text representation (which can be automated), there is the venerable graphviz: https://graphviz.gitlab.io/
and d2, which I've discovered as of late, and while simple, is not too bad either: https://d2lang.com/

[Faranight]

The Draw.io is online and free to use: https://app.diagrams.net Back in the days I also used Wondershare EdrawMax. Although it's a paid version, I found it very useful and fully featured.

[selcuk]

I think you need to spend time for a good looking drawing. For user manuals, datasheets etc. I can recommend inkscape + scribus. You can prepare complex vector graphics with inkscape and import them to scribus to do the rest of the document. You can do drawings with scribus as well but inkscape has a more range of tools.

[nctnico]

Nowadays  I find myself using the online wordprocessing and presentation tools from Google quite a lot for this purpose. It works quite well and is easy to share. All you need is a free Google account.

[Stray Electron]

   I don't do that kind of work but I would suggest that you look at GIMP. I think it will do everything that you want. And it's been released to the public domain so it will probably be available for a LONG time, unlike some of the other photo editors that have how gotten insanely expensive. And it is available for Apple, Windows and Linux.

   About 10 or 15 years ago my wife did a lot of reasonable simple drawings with drawings and text and flow charts etc for her work  with Power Point and they turned out very well but I don't know what the licensing for PP is like today or, if like some of the other products, it has gotten too complicated for simple tasks.

[forrestc]

I would say Libre Office Draw but it's a huge install and slow and lumbering, but does get you a drawing package that I think might do the job

I've been using LibreOffice for many years, but I hadn't played with draw for ... well, let's just say a long time.  It used to be just not good.

At first glance, this seems like it has improved quite a bit, I'll give it a good shot.   The first impressions are that the tools work like I'd like, it's just styling that I'll have to mess with.

[forrestc]

Have you tried Dia or Inkscape?

Unfortunately Dia hasn't been updated for a long time (almost 10 years), and it isn't really the tool I'm looking for in it's present form due to it's rather plain graphics style.

Inkscape is a great drawing tool.  I used to use it quite a bit before I ended up with an Adobe Creative Cloud Subscription with Adobe Illustrator which is a very similar commercial program.    The problem I have with both for what I'm looking for here is that while it's a great drawing tool, it isn't great for quick production of the illustrations I'm needing to do.   In the programming world I'd call what I'm looking for "opinionated", meaning the creator has made a lot of decisions for you about what works well so you don't have to think about it that much.  I.E. when you put text on top of an image you by default get a contrasting outline around text, or a connector line does at least something which might be correct if you click on the two "connection" points - it does all the curves in the middle.   

Inkscape and Illustrator (and for that matter, many drawing softwares) are more of a "here are all the tools you need to do a drawing, good luck" type of tools, whereas I'm hoping for something which is more end-purpose-focused on "educational drawings" where I don't have to be an artist or take the time to do artist-like stuff.

[Infraviolet]

For anything assembly related or mechanical, I'd always recommend taking screenshots or doing renders within the CAD package you designed the parts in. If for no other reason that that you already have everything modelled in there, and already know the CAD program's interface well. Usually it helps if you turn on visual settings within the CAD software to make edge lines (lines marking outlines or hard/sharp edges) bold and fat, and if you hide lines which divide up smooth curves in to fla faces (if it is a mesh type model where everything is a triangle or quad if you zoom in enough). You'll usually want perspective view rather than the orthographic many packages use as default. You can then post-process these renders/screenshots a bit further in GIMP or Photoshop (or equivalent) to further hide irrelevant details and highlight important ones.

GIMP has a downloadable arrow plugin that lets you draw arrows with two or three clicks, and makes overlaying text easy. And there are methods to make both arrow and text have a contrasting outline (black text with a thin white border or such) which makes it clearly visible even atop a chaotic brightly coloured background image. As far as arrows go, you can also often add them within the CAD package before rendering.

[forrestc]

I think you need to spend time for a good looking drawing. For user manuals, datasheets etc. I can recommend inkscape + scribus. You can prepare complex vector graphics with inkscape and import them to scribus to do the rest of the document. You can do drawings with scribus as well but inkscape has a more range of tools.

One thing I should have probably mentioned is that I have and use the entire Adobe Creative Cloud suite that has Adobe Illustrator which I use fairly heavily.  For things that are "permanent" I'm going to spend a lot of time getting things right using illustrator and other tools.  This includes such silly things like color grading all the raw images and ensuring font sizes/types and line styles are consistent across documents, and so on.

This is more for responses to tech support-type questions like "I'm trying to wire your widget up to my thingamajig and can't figure it out".   Often this means taking our stock photo of our widget and then grabbing a picture/screen grab of the thingamajig and then drawing 'wires' between them.    Sometimes callouts are needed.  Sometimes, other elements, such as simple text.   I don't want to spend hours on a single response.  Instead, I want to take 5 minutes to produce something serviceable that doesn't look like I spent 5 minutes on it and that I have no pride in my work.   

I think a lot of my underlying issue is that I have and continue to do various pieces of graphic design, and it pains me to send out really bad drawings.  I guess I really want a tool that lets me quickly throw together a not-perfect drawing that, at a minimum, doesn't have the egregious sins that you end up with in most drawing programs.  For example, scaling callout 'art' shouldn't also stretch the 'arrow' part of the callout (which I'm also finding to be a common sin of this type of software). 

[Nominal Animal]

Configuring Inkscape to your workflow, paying extra attention to preset grids you can enable/disable, scaling options you already mentioned, and using advanced snapping options to do the details, is a must in my opinion.  Inkscape has many per-document settings, but also "global" user interface settings; tuning all those, perhaps with a few custom templates for typical work, is a lot of work, but in the end, worth it.

Here's a few I've drawn in Inkscape just for fun, illustrating technical discussions and questions and answers here and elsewhere:

I can't say whether I'd consider them proper illustrations or just doodles, because I don't spend much time on these – only enough to get my idea/argument across – but they're definitely technical.  If you can't tell, I use at least one grid in every SVG illustration I create. 

As to plots and such, I usually use gnuplot (curves) or Graphviz (graphs) to generate the SVG, then finesse it a bit in Inkscape.  (At minimum, I convert text to paths, so that it renders the same way for everyone regardless of available fonts.)

[mendip_discovery]

Adobe stuff is very good but it does have its moments where it wont do what you want becuase it is trying to second guess what you are doing and does the wrong thing.

You might find it worth getting some tuition on using it for what you want. There is plenty of scripting options that might help your workflow but you need to know the right incantions to get it to work. I miss macromedia and their program called Freehand, that was really easy to draw with but it got bought out by Adobe where they killed the software off, even the golden goose aka Flash.