Visio (was: Auto-building docs manual)

[Migrated from the RPG list]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 12:46 PM, Craig Richards <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If I'm honest I would say the most useful documentation I've found to be my
own visio diagrams with annotations.
Well, I say Visio, but my version is Visio 4 - way before microsoft got
involved and sadly I just can't get that to run in Windows 10.
I can get it to run on my mac in my old copy of VMware Fusion but I can
never get the virtual printing to work properly.
So these days, with the extortionate price that microsoft charge for visio
it's googledocs drawings for me!

Have you given Dia a try? It is a free and open-source alternative to Visio:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia/

It's pretty old now, but a lot newer than Visio 4. Then again, it's
entirely possible that newer versions of Visio and Visio-inspired
software may be less appealing to you, because of user interface
changes or whatever.

Still, there are quite many alternatives out there today. My personal
favorite diagram software (focused on the mathematical notion of
graphs composed of vertices and edges) is yEd.

But there are also Lucidchart, Gliffy, Creately, and a host of others.
If you Google "best software for drawing flowcharts" you'll get a bar
at the top with many, many viable alternatives. I'm confident
something there will strike your fancy. You may well be surprised by
just how awesome some of the modern software is. For my purposes,
Lucidchart and yEd were revolutionary. Paradigm-changing. Like
suddenly being able to fly.

John Y.