Package Reviews

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Goal

Which one is suitable for my flow-chart diagram.

Tcm

Everything can be placed and remembered, but does not survive through modification. I.e., if you change anything, then all the placement of items connecting to it will get forgotten. E.g., if you change a node's text, then all edges that connected to it will be automatically re-placed, and so are the the texts that associated with the edges.

Hence, if you don't like where tcm place things, it will be a nightmare to maintain the diagram. Further, the tcm is really not good at placing things, e.g., the edge text are placed over the edge, which 99% of time looks bad.

xfig

Nuisance:

Not intuitive UI
No multi-line text

Dia

Nuisance:

iterms are too big. Need to scale to about 200% to have a bit realistic-sized view
Can't draw reasonably-sized graph. Put 4 boxes and it is over the page width. Fonts already at 0.4, but there is no way to make the gap between text and box smaller. Make the graph looks rater silly.

kivio

Nuisance:

requires koffice-data koffice-libs
produces lots of garbage info in the xterm that lauches it
way too few pre-defined shapes, even don't have rounded boxes.
most important, the stencil can only be straight line!
the arrow head of straight line looks stupidly big
once draw, the lines are be barely selectable. moving it is even much harder. Cost me over 4 hours for very simple graph.
when exporting (to png/eps), a strange bug causes a big blank area on the left of the image, even I've select crop. Copy and paste to a new graph won't help.