For many of you including me, drawing some flowchart or some diagram for our day to day educational or professional work involve use of some flow charting software.The most known software which is used for this work is Windows Visio and lots of people use it for their work for personnel or commercial purpose.
But today i will be talking about Dia which i use often for my work. As i am a design engineer though mechanical, still my work require some flow charting often. For all that flow charting work i prefer Dia which i am using since i was doing my post graduation.
Dia is inspired by the commercial Windows program ‘Visio’, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.
It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).
Dia is useful for university students who need to draw so many things for daily studies and research.Also a professional user too can use it for his work as i have been doing till now.
Dia is available both for Windows and linux.You can download the relevant package depending upon your operating system.
You can download Dia here.
