Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?
A large collection of tools.  The trick seems to be to find apps that&#x27;re good at particular jobs, then compose the components drawn from those apps together into a scene.<p>1.  PowerPoint for composition.  Unless whatever graphic you&#x27;re making is simple enough to be produced by just 1 program, it&#x27;s good to have a canvas-like program that you can assemble the components in.  For me, that&#x27;s usually PowerPoint, since it can be pretty free-form.  PowerPoint slides can be embedded into Word documents as active content.<p>2.  Equations:  Word&#x27;s equation editor or TeX.  Other Microsoft Office products like PowerPoint and Excel have an equation editor built into them too, but those equation editors tend to be inferior to Word&#x27;s.  I used to copy&#x2F;paste Word-equations into PowerPoint.  Mathematica&#x27;s an option if you&#x27;re using it anyway, though it can look kinda clunky.<p>3.  Graphs (excluding labels):  Excel or a ray-tracer.  For simple graphs, you can usually do them in Excel -- just have to learn the customization options (which I think folks often overlook, getting discouraged by the non-customized versions).  For more complex graphs, sometimes it&#x27;s just easiest to write your own ray-tracing scene.  Matlab can be decent for some 3D surface figures, once you edit out its labels and replace them with better ones.<p>4.  Labels:  Word&#x27;s equation editor or TeX again.  While graph-creating tools can often insert labels just fine, they tend to be a bit rudimentary.  So, once you make a graph, put it into PowerPoint, then insert your own axis labels and other markup by copying them from equation-editor tools.  If you want to add arrows, circle something, or anything like that, then you can use PowerPoint&#x27;s shapes.<p>5.  Simple flow diagrams:  Microsoft Visio or PowerPoint, depending on the kind.  PowerPoint&#x27;s probably better for the simplest things, but Visio scales better for larger diagrams.<p>6.  Engineering designs:  Whatever CAD you made them in.  For example, I used to put chemical process schematics together in AspenTech&#x27;s Aspen Plus, then copy&#x2F;paste them into PowerPoint for further markup.<p>7.  Minor tweaking: Paint, Paint.NET, etc..  If you just want to tweak a graphic or something before pasting it into PowerPoint, simple image-editing tools can let you do that.<p>8.  Security:  Write your own script.  If you have some graphic that might have hidden tracking information embedded in slight pixel alterations, then you can do stuff like:<p>a. round pixel RGB values to the nearest 5 (or whatever);<p>b. merge pixels together (like Paint would if you shrink an image);<p>c. save as JPEG or some other lossful format;<p>d. randomly (using a CRNG) mutate pixel values by slight amounts to inject invisible noise.<p>9.  Complex diagrams:  Ray-tracing.  Honestly I love ray-tracing stuff; it feels like a brute-force solution to just about anything you could want to draw, and if you like programming, I think it&#x27;s one of those projects that you really ought to do at some point just as a matter of being well-versed in computers.<p>---<p>Overall, my big tip would be to be aware of the various tools that can do parts of the overall job well, then compose them in a general canvas-like setting like PowerPoint, and then finalize any little tweaks using an image-editor.