General > General Technical Chat
Simple technical illustration software/tools?
5U4GB:
--- Quote from: forrestc on May 10, 2024, 01:50:38 am ---Visio is just a PITA licensing wise and it isn't really what I'm looking for.
--- End quote ---
Before you give up on it, look at older versions that you can get on eBay for next to nothing. Like most of the rest of the Office suite they haven't really added anything of value in at least 20 years so using older versions is just fine. I'm using Visio 2003, I'm not going to go so far as to say it's good but it does suck a lot less than anything equivalent that I've tried, and cost me $0.
nctnico:
--- Quote from: 5U4GB on May 12, 2024, 12:03:37 pm ---
--- Quote from: forrestc on May 10, 2024, 01:50:38 am ---Visio is just a PITA licensing wise and it isn't really what I'm looking for.
--- End quote ---
Before you give up on it, look at older versions that you can get on eBay for next to nothing. Like most of the rest of the Office suite they haven't really added anything of value in at least 20 years so using older versions is just fine. I'm using Visio 2003, I'm not going to go so far as to say it's good but it does suck a lot less than anything equivalent that I've tried, and cost me $0.
--- End quote ---
Agreed, Visio is a simple to use tool and the older versions are just as good. I'm using the version from 2000 myself but since I'm moving away from MS Office, I use it less and less.
Ranayna:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on May 12, 2024, 07:36:07 am ---For the answers, start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress "The study, which involved 1,400 respondents, found that 57 per cent saw the dress as blue and black, 30 per cent saw it as white and gold, 11 per cent saw it as blue and brown, and two per cent reported it as 'other'"
--- End quote ---
I remember that thing :D But i haven't seen it for a long time, and don't remember that particular image.
I instinctivley said to myself: white and gold.
Then i read your listed responses, and i can definetly see why some say blue and brown. Blue and brown are the actual colors i see there, but i assume seeing that bit of bright background caused my mind to color correct my impression. I still think in proper light the dress is white and gold.
forrestc:
I appreciate everyone's responses as I've learned about some tools I didn't know about, and I'm going to try a couple of the tools for real drawings over the next little bit.
But... Based on the responses, I think I still haven't conveyed what I'm looking for.
I'm literally talking about taking two images and putting text and "wires" on them. I timed one I did a couple days ago.... 2.5 minutes total.
Here's the entire workflow:
1) grab internal stock images of our products.
2) if necessary grab a picture of the product that we're hooking to
3) paste both pictures into a canvas.
4) use line or marker tool to draw lines between the connection points.
5) Add callout boxes and/or text to provide some context or additional non-drawable information.
6) save as jpeg, send to customer.
I.E. one recently was "I have two batteries and a 24V charger, and your monitoring product. Can you help me hook everything together?". Grab images of the batteries customer is using. Grab image of the charger they say their using, grab stock photo of our product. Use red line tool to draw jumper between two batteries and then a red and black line from the batteries to the charger's battery input. Then draw two more lines and a fuse "square" to the voltage monitoring input on our product. Total investment, 5-10 minutes of my time, customer is happy with our customer support.
For permanent drawings, I use a completely different workflow and end up with drawings which are much more professional looking. I use the same tools as everyone is mentioning for these. Instead, what I'm looking for is the equivalent of "photoshop express" for processing photos.
To help visually show what I'm wanting to improve on, I just created and uploaded a 3 minute version of what I typically do, with made up images I just grabbed off the web. See https://youtu.be/I5PSOP1PrGg . The grey spots near the front is where I'm grabbing the images off of a browser on another screen. And, I made a couple of mistakes along the way that I had to fix. Plus, I normally just use the black outlined text as I'm often on a mixed background that it is helpful for - so I wasn't sure the best way to turn off the outline.
What I'm hoping for is a similar "quick drawing" tool which has just enough additional features that it's more useful for the wiring "diagrams" like this I produce. Like I said in a previous message- more options for line coloring (i.e. for striped wires like is found in many cable assemblies), and also some line smoothing/connection tools.
shabaz:
PowerPoint meets all the bullet-points that were mentioned, but for sure it's not a 'pro' tool, it's just an easy-to-use tool (mostly!). I can't say if it is quick to use or not, because doing some stuff 'just right' will take time, depending on if one is a perfectionist or not. But if you don't make perfect the enemy of good, then PP can be very quick to create understandable diagrams of the type you showed. I'm just mentioning this in case PP had been written off as a viable option or not, that it might still be worth persevering with, if some of the features of it are unknown.
Going through the bullet-points that were mentioned:
* Regarding clipart/images, PP works nicely with Snagit. Clean up images (and remove background etc) with Snagit, and then paste into PP.
* Text can have outlines, shadow etc with PP
* Custom callouts can be created using the shape addition feature in PowerPoint. For instance, combine a rectangle with an arrow. The shape addition/subtraction etc is very empowering generally.
* Use the 'Curve' shape to draw lines approximately. Then, refine them using right-click and Edit Points. It takes a bit of practice but you can usually make it follow your preferred path almost entirely with this method.
Biggest downside is that the curve doesn't connect to other objects, so you could be tweaking often if the lines are placed too early in the entire diagram. As a result, I mostly rather use straight lines, or elbow connectors, since these will stretch elastically if connected objects are moved. Often you need the connector to attach at a different location on an object, and there are two ways to do that; (a) by right-clicking on the shape and select Edit Points and then add a point, or (b) [easier] draw a smaller simple object, like a triangle, with the apex at the location where you want the connector to join. Group the objects. Now connectors will attach to the apex. After you're sorted, send the triangles to the back, so they are not visible. That technique works very well for putting connections onto arbitrary parts of a photo for instance, and then send them to back after the connections have been made.
* Stripey insulation wires can be done by drawing a line or curve, giving it a thickness and a color, and then copy-paste it, and change the line style to dashed, change its color, and then drop it on top of the previous line. Admittedly not straightforward, but the result is good. This works with curved lines and the connector lines.
* The resolution from PP is excellent. There is some registry hack googleable to export at very high resolution PNG, but a simpler (lazier : ) approach is to just use a very high-res monitor, go to slideshow mode, and then use Snagit to capture the high-res output directly from the display, rather than an image export.
That technique that @Nominal Animal mentioned earlier about thin breaks where lines cross, is something I've found useful too, there's also a slight variation which is to use the 'glow' feature (with color chosen to be white) to give a usually invisible outline to some wires, which becomes visible at crossings.
If you look at the color diagrams that were in an earlier comment (before the long distraction of color-blindness) all those diagrams used many of the PP techniques just mentioned (for instance you can see a glow around a wire, use of connectors with hidden triangle apexes to anchor points, and there's also an example of where curved lines were made to join different parts of schematics, where the 'edit points' method was used to make it follow a path). Lots of copy/paste and the alignment and distribution tools within PP are great to speed things up. One other tip to speed up diagrams, is to keep all the 'best bits' in a single ppt file, for reuse. For instance, if you've already created handy callout boxes or particular overlays for photos etc., then you can use bits from that file as a template many times. I often do that with shapes that I created, like batteries, logic gates, even coiled wires of several colors! (since it can take a while to create that initially); it becomes a convenient palette of tech images/icons for your future requests that come up.
From my limited use of Visio, I get the feeling that it has a lot of flexibility too, and probably more powerful for diagramming, but I just happened to pick PowerPoint and got used to many of the features within it, that I now have trouble using Visio for anything but standard diagrams (e.g. flow charts etc).
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