[Chicago] Visio Altenatives

[Martin Maney]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 11:40:06AM -0600, Brian Ray wrote:
> I am just looking for some free flow charting software.  Has anyone  
> tried, Dia? UML and Python scriptability support is a plus, but not my  
> primary goal.  I need to send a flowchart as PDF to an international  
> workgroup who may embed as a graphic in a spec or publication.

I've been abusing dia's UML templates to document a fairly complex (1)
Django app's models and been pretty happy with it for that.  I suppose
flow charts are just the thing for some applications, but I haven't
drawn one since... oh, well, last month, but that was to help decipher
some old PIC microcontroller code.  Hmmm...  Looks like a pretty good
set of flowchart symbols there...


(1) twenty six tables, counting many-to-many relations as well as a
good bunch of auxillary tables (viz., provide target for FK to
constrain a main table's column, map it to human-friendly name or
description, sometimes add characterization of the codes for the
program to use...).  By ERP standards it's tiny, but most Django apps
seem to run to half a dozen models or less.  (s/Django/web/, really).

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