On July 13, 2005 09:27 pm, Morgan Olsson wrote:
> Alex Harford 19:53 2005-07-12:
> >> I tend to draw most of my diagrams/flowcharts in CorelDraw (can't
> >> stand Visio), then copy them into a Word document, and add the
> >> text. It works, but somehow I feel there ought to be better tools
> >> for the job.
>
> Certainly, you should try OpenOffice.
> I found it useful for almost anything, although i rarely do
> flowsharts, i must admit, so i have not tested other solutions. 
> (Except pen and paper of course)
>
> Use the Draw portion of OOo.  There use the link line function to
> connect different objects; the links will then follow when you move
> and resize objects.  (although they may overlap ugly, so you might
> need to drag them manually for finish quality)  Use text objects set
> to resize with the text.  Draw the other function block symbols as
> you wish.

I have to agree. Open Office is quite nice and you can't argue with the 
price either.  I did notice that on Windows computers, that Windows 
Update sometimes resets the associations back to Word if you have both 
Open Office & Microsoft Word on the same computer, otherwise all is 
okay (I left the installed Microsoft word that came bundled with that 
particular machine as a backup in case the user didn't like open 
office, but so far they still use open office, which to me is a good 
indication of acceptance.
As an example, except for imported screenshots, I managed to create an 
entire manual plus an exported PDF-manual using just openoffice. The 
small free version manual is here, so it should give you an idea of 
what you can accomplish if you want to really go nuts and use fancy 
features ;-)
http://www.JoesCat.com/micro/picdisl.zip

If your pcb software is capable of exporting postscript, you could 
import a re-sizable version of your PCBs and or schematics as well.

The pdf export makes it compact/useful for a customer copy and I noticed 
that the exported PDF is compatible across a range of PDF readers, for 
example, Adobe reader ver 3 for OS/2 (old), all the Adobe readers for 
windows (tried 4,5,6), linux ghostscript. So from a customer 
standpoint, if they have a postscript reader, however old it may be, 
they seem okay reading the file.

> I have also seen this done with a schematic capture, with the
> functions blocks made as symbols.  Link reroute is there much nicer,
> but less "designable" look than in OOo.  Plus OOo have one-button
> export to pdf, and of course much better text and graphic features. 
> Plus is free.  http://www.openoffice.org.

You may want to use the adobe standard type fonts so that it is more 
cross-platform, so instead of windows arial, select helvetica, but 
courier and times roman appear to have the same names on various 
platforms. You may want to import graphics and other stuff as 
postscript instead of jpgs, gifs, or other pixelized type pictures 
since the results tend to look a little sharper.

> ...Havning said that i find the IT development have made me use
> desiging using computer *less* for small electronic projects.  I find
> i often entirely use pen-and-paper then photograph the drawig, notes,
> and actual result, some key components, plus oscilloscpoe curve (got
> o DSO) and dump it in a folder on the hard disk together with any
> correspondence with customer and any files (datasheet etc)...

Sometimes, the amount of work doing it via computer doesn't make sense, 
and I have to agree doing paper-work is quick for small projects.
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