
Ask HN: Tool to digitize hand-written diagrams? - hideo
The products&#x2F;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.<p>Is anyone aware of any tools (either software or hardware) that can do one or more of these things:<p><pre><code>  * Sketch&#x2F;erase parts of a diagram by hand
  * Standard shapes (lines&#x2F;arrows and boxes&#x2F;circles)
  * import small images and icons
  * Export to drawIO or SVG&#x2F;PNG form
  * Import older diagrams and edit&#x2F;modify them
  * Animate or record the diagramming process
</code></pre>
Really my only constraint is that it cost &lt;$250-300
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yesenadam
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/](http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/)

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veli_joza
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.

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MrTonyD
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.

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

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nobody271
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.

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

