

Ask HN: Alternatives to Omnigraph Sketcher? - anigbrowl

So, I have been drawing a lot of economics diagrams lately, and found myself wanting to do nicer versions on the computer. I went looking for tools and found Omnigraph Sketcher...which looks absolutely perfect, but which only runs on Mac. I think it's well worth $30, but not worth buying a new computer for! Astonishingly, there doesn't seem to be anything like it on the web or for Windows. Any suggestions?<p>What it does: http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraphsketcher/ This might look like something that could be achieved in many other ways, which is partly true, but I'll briefly explain why they're less than ideal (hopefully this saves someone else the trouble).<p>Spreadsheet: you could put in numbers and graph them. But often you just want to explore the conceptual possibilities with a diagram, rather than tie it to any particular numbers. Alternatively, you might want to draw a diagram and specify one point on an axis as being equal to a particular number in order to <i>discover</i> what the other numbers would be.<p>Drawing programs: Something like Visio or Google docs can make lots of spiffy diagrams, but they're not much good at measuring angles/lengths/geometrical quantities. Pro illustration programs are better, but it's quite difficult to turn the metrics into content on the diagram or export them.<p>Graphing calculator/math software: a great deal of economic analysis resembles plotting functions against each other and integrating over the results. But it only resembles it, and overconfident application of math wizardry can turn out to be misleading (see: financial crisis of 2008 for an example...). More to the point, you don't know what your functions are ahead of time, and often there's way more software overhead than you would ever want or need.
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alecco
OmniGraffle is based on graphviz (and costs $99 vs. MS Visio $200.)

With a bit of learning and patience you can draw graphs with graphviz by
yourself. With the added value of being able to script the graphs and perhaps
use templates. It's not as hard as it looks at first.

<http://www.graphviz.org/Gallery.php>

