Ask HN: Tool to digitize hand-written diagrams? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tool to digitize hand-written diagrams?

7 pointshideo6 comments

The products/projects I work on require a lot of block diagrams. I end up spending a lot of time drawing things on paper or whiteboard, and then recreating them on draw.io or other such tools.

Is anyone aware of any tools (either software or hardware) that can do one or more of these things:

  * Sketch/erase parts of a diagram by hand
  * Standard shapes (lines/arrows and boxes/circles)
  * import small images and icons
  * Export to drawIO or SVG/PNG form
  * Import older diagrams and edit/modify them
  * Animate or record the diagramming process

Really my only constraint is that it cost <$250-300

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TikZ in LaTeX is pretty cool for doing all kinds of diagrams/graphics. From simple block diagrams to fancy stuff[0] There's an excellent long manual widely available online as a PDF, and a lot of packages. TikZ is pretty horrible as a programming language (e.g. variables and loops are fiddly and verbose), but you can define your own commands in LaTeX and use those in TikZ, and so make a simple command for any shape (w. label/style) you need repeatedly.

[0] see http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/

I'm also drawing a lot diagrams and the best tool I found is yED. You have to input diagrams manually (no hand sketching), but it's fast and resulting diagram is impressive. Just learn the keyboard shortcuts. For example, with Ctrl+W you can quickly create new connected block, and with arrows you can navigate existing blocks.

It's free, though it doesn't really do enough for your use. I use zoomNotes on my iPad with an Apple pencil. It converts hand drawn boxes and shapes, and does exports, but as far as I know doesn't convert arrows. It has a "whiteboard" feature which means a huge drawing canvas, which is very nice. The free aspect for the zoomnotes lite version makes this particularly appealing.

I saw Sketch2Code in HN a few weeks ago, hope it helps: https://github.com/Microsoft/ailab/tree/master/Sketch2Code

OneNote does the first three. AFAIK you need to use the screen snip tool for the second. You can use Windows-Key+G to screen record it.

There was a free tool but I can’t remember the name.

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