Linux support on-site, on-line and in the cloud.

DIA structured diagram tool.

2015-10-22: Dia is a free, open source structured diagram tool. With Dia you can produce flowcharts, network diagrams, wiring charts, entity relationship diagrams and much more.

Dia is generally considered to be easy to use, as these things go, and is recommended in just under 90% of user ratings. I find it pretty intuitive and have been able to create more contemporary looking objects on the fly when preparing network diagrams which has not been the case with other tools I've used.

There are apparently over 1,000 predefined objects and symbols downloaded with the application. I've not counted them and I doubt I would use more than a handful but it has to be acknowledged that this is nowhere near the number that you would get with a large commercial package like Visio. That said I find with Dia that generating new objects is so swift that I prefer to work with the small set of drawing tools provided and my own set of objects.

The documentation is good and is available on line.

Dia is available for Linux/UNIX platforms, Windows and Mac OS X so if your main desktop platform is MS Windows you can use Dia with a central Linux repository on the office or corporate file server.

Many import and export formats are available including PNG, Postscript, PDF, SVG, DXF, Visio XML, tiff and BMP. A word of caution however, check your desired export after each new object is added to your diagram. Some of the exports are quite sensitive and it is possible to find that a change may blow away a previously working export, you need to know which changes do this at the time to avoid having to replicate hours of work.

Dia is scriptable via Python.

City Linux support includes the installation, configuration and support of Dia structured diagramming.