There are several well-known commercial flowchart and diagram
software available, e.g., Visio on Windows, OmniGraffle on MacOS X.
Then what about Linux? In fact, there are a couple of reasonably good
Linux alternatives to Visio or OmniGraffle, for example,
yEd,
Dia,
LibreOffice Draw,
Pencil Project, etc.
In this tutorial, I will describe
how to create flowchart or diagram with yEd graph editor on Linux.
yEd is an extremely easy-to-use, yet feature-rich diagram editor
written in Java. Using yEd, you can create flowcharts, BPMN/UML
diagrams, organizational charts, or any kind of graphs containing nodes
and edges. It also features many sophisticated layout generation
algorithms built-in, which allow you to test alternative layouts of
created diagrams or graphs with a single button click.
Install yEd on Linux
yEd is a standalone Java application whose JAR file is freely downloadable from
its website.
So you can run yEd on any platform which has Java Run Time (JRE)
installed. Assuming that you downloaded yEd zip file and have JRE
installed on your Linux, you can install yEd as follows.
$ sudo unzip yEd-3.11.1.zip -d /opt
Then create a script named
yed in /usr/bin directory, which launches JVM as shown below.
$ sudo vi /usr/bin/yed
#!/bin/sh
java -jar /opt/yed-3.11.1/yed.jar
Next, make the script executable.
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/yed
Now you can launch yEd editor simply by running the script as follows.
$ yed
If you want, you can also
create a desktop shortcut for yEd with the following information.
- Name: yEd
- Command: java -jar /opt/yed-3.11.1/yed.jar
- Icon: /opt/yed-3.11.1/icons/yicon32.png
Once you launch yEd, you will see an initial yEd window where you can create or open a yEd document file.
Draw a Diagram with yEd
yEd allows you to create any kind of diagram in a snap. You will see
a "palette" window in the right sidebar, which shows a variety of nodes
and edges to choose from. For example, I created the following network
diagram in less than ten minutes.
Once you create a diagram, you can try yEd's built-in layout
algorithms to automatically transform the diagram into different
layouts. For example, I tried regenerating the original layout as
follows.
Layout #1: Edge routing - orthogonal bus style
Layout #2: Edge routing - orthogonal channel
Layout #3: Circular
Draw a Flowchart with yEd
Besides diagrams, you can also draw flowcharts as easily. For example:
Once you create a flowchart, you can also explore various flowchart
layouts. For example, you can change the orientation of the flowchart
from vertical to horizontal as follows.
Draw a Generic Graph with yEd
yEd has built-in templates for various graph types: grid, tree,
planar and random graphs. For example, if you want to generate a tree
graph, you can instantly create one by entering the number of nodes, fan
out, and tree depth as follows.
Among a number of other features, yEd has automatic grouping feature,
where you can group individual components in automatic fashions. This
is convenient when you are dealing with so many different components in
your diagram.
Once you are done with editing a flowchart or diagram, you can save it to a file. By default, yEd saves a current layout in
GraphML format
which is an XML-based textual file format for graphs. So you can
manually edit or version control yEd files easily. If you want, you can
export it to various image formats including
png, jpg, gif, eps, pdf and svg.
http://xmodulo.com/2013/11/draw-flowchart-diagram-linux.html
