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tyleo

Hell, I’m a dev and I already produce most of my slide shows in Figma. I’m so happy a dedicated product is coming!

I find Figma unmatched for architecture diagrams. It’s nice to have them at my disposal when preparing slide shows.

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For architecture diagrams Ive found Google drawing will work for my use cases. And if its something fancy, lucidchart.

I would definitely use Draw.io over Google Drawings. That sounds a bit masochistic to be honest!

Google Drawings was the bees knees 15 years ago, and since it is a dead product and hasn't changed one bit today it isn't.

We use excalidraw a lot, but my excitement has waned a bit there as well.

Yeah I used Excalidraw for a while, but once the novelty of the sketchy look wears off it's really a very basic drawing program. Not suitable for proper technical diagrams (which to be fair it isn't intended to be).

In a way it felt to me like Excalidraw works around your diagrams not looking very good by just making them obviously not intended to look good. But Draw.io solves that problem by just making them actually look good.

The only issue I have with Draw.io is that it can't export text in SVG properly - every text object is really an embedded HTML element, which means you can only view the resulting SVGs in browsers. They don't work anywhere else you'd want to use an SVG (e.g. embedded in a PDF). https://www.drawio.com/doc/faq/svg-export-text-problems

It doesn't seem like they care about solving that problem properly unfortunately. Their "solution" is:

> "Convert Labels to SVG" transmits the diagram to our servers, generates a PDF, then pipes that through Inkscape, and returns the SVG output.

Jesus.

Aside from that it's an amazing program. A worthy successor to Dia.

> They don't work anywhere else you'd want to use an SVG (e.g. embedded in a PDF)

My workflow is exporting to PDF and then just embedding that inside the larger PDF. Works fine?

Yes but that requires an extra step and we're also using the SVGs with Asciidoc which can generate HTML too. I don't think it even supports PDF images. We'd basically have to do what Draw.io did - export to PDF (very slowly), then covert it to SVG with Inkscape. Gross.

draw.io is pretty good IMHO. The fact that it has a reasonably rich set of built-in shapes, and you can add any arbitrary jpg or png file to your diagram, makes it immensely useful IMHO. I also love that it integrates with Google Drive or you can download/upload an XML file yourself.

I had never heard of Google drawing until now. Interesting.

Just curious, why do you use Figma over other slide making tools? Just for architecture diagrams, or your familiarity with the tool?

I'm not a Figma user and have no clue, and am wondering if it's worth giving a shot as a new user.

Ultimately it just feels better, over Keynote I’d say better alignment controls, less defaults to unset, collaboration and sharing which keynote lacks, zoom out to see the whole thing and move things about easier.

Also because it’s already an excellent design tool you never hit the wall where a diagram can’t be created in it like you hit often in Keynote/PPT/Google Slides

(I haven’t tried Figma Slides yet, this is normal Figma)

visual control

With the way figma has been rugpulling free features for paid ones Im worried prototyping will be enshitefied (or some other needed feature) so we can no longer present from designs without paying for slides

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