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by alok-g 4600 days ago
With reference to: https://mathapedia.com/books/34/sections/203/526

The code for the second example does not sound impressive to me. I do not want to draw diagrams by specifying coordinates of each and every box and label. How do I tell it to draw a label in the center of an already placed box?

Is there a way/tool where diagrams can be drawn at a higher level of abstraction where the user does not have to specify each and every thing? I have seen a few approaches, none of which sounds to be feature-complete:

yEd [1] lets the user draw graphs and store them in formats where they can be read by a program into a graph object. I found it very difficult to use yEd to draw anything but graphs.

MS-Word includes smart art. While I am not sure, but the storage format sounds to be something intelligent such that it would at least theoretically be possible to read the diagram programmatically into the corresponding data structure. Only issue is that the templates are fairly limited and I cannot figure how to draw anything else. Drawing a graph for example does not look possible.

Then there are UML tools that should have fit the purpose but often are not intuitive enough to use. They are also not intended to draw general-purpose diagrams.

And finally mindmap-based applications that do nothing else but mindmaps.

[1] http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html

1 comments

I agree about drawing diagrams by specifying coordinates (it is tedious). The point here is to make existing LaTeX publishable online. It would be great if there was a web tool to generate the diagram PSTricks code