Need a tree diagrammer that's not OmniGraffle

[michaelsanford]

Good point fryke ! It's $41.95 US (so about 63 $ for me) which is still too much for graphic outlining, which I don't do often enough to warrant an expenditure like that.

Thanks for the idea though.

[Viro]

What about dia? You can install it via fink or compile it yourself and it is pretty much the diagramming standard on Gnome.

[michaelsanford]

Hey hey two things I like to hear : Fink and diagramming standrad !

I'll take a look. For some reason, Mr xaddicted didn't even think to look for any X application to do this !

I don't see it in Fink so I ust downloaded the source from gnome.com. I suppose this means I'll have to install gnome too...

Thanks ! I'll post my results.

[lurk]

Another great option is graphviz which was done by At&T it is now free and has an Aqua front end. It is a little like programming but the results are beautiful.

[whyre]

Perhaps freemind, the price is right, though I'm not sure if it will accomplish exactly what you need. Altough I will say is fits the bill for writing down ideas for just about any project.

[michaelsanford]

Anything free is always worth a look, I just downloaded it.

Thanks whyre.

[karavite]

This won't fit your free or cheap bill, but Inspiration is the only tool I found that lets you enter an outline as text, then creates the tree diagram, though it does some quirky things. I mean, this is not rocket science, but nobody has really made a tool that makes this as simple as it should be. I once saw a description of how you can do this with excel and visio (export a very specifically organized excel file in a certain format and then import into visio for "instant" text to diagram) - it was so complex and convoluted, I could take art lessons and draw the Sisteen Chapel in less time! :-)