Quick and easy drawing app?

mike peelmike peel
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
Hi all,



I'm after something that I can doodle diagrams in during my physics lectures. Something akin to M$ Word's drawing tools, but more advanced.



The problem with Word's drawing tools is that they are a bit complicated to use (it'd be better if I could just select the line tool, and have it stay as a line tool while I draw many lines, rather than deselecting after each line, as an example), and unlike Word 2002 or 2003 on the PC the Mac Office X doesn't seem to give the drawings their own workspace, but just layer them over the top of the text.



I only have the touchpad to work with at the moment - no mouse or graphics tablet, although I plan to get a tablet when I get the money (Wacom ones are rather expensive, and I don't know of any other ones that work with Macs). But if the program were good enough this should just be an annoyance rather than a problem.



Any suggestions?



Thanks,

--Mike Peel

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    OmniGraffle.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Kickaha

    OmniGraffle.



    Seconded.



    OmniGraffle rules for diagramming.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    mike peelmike peel Posts: 185member
    Well, I now have the demo version installed... Am having a few problems, though. When copying the images from OmniGraffle to Word, there's severe pixellation - how can I get rid of this?



    (And no, printing from OG isn't an option - I need the images embedded amongst text rather than on their own pages)
  • Reply 4 of 7
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Mike Peel

    Well, I now have the demo version installed... Am having a few problems, though. When copying the images from OmniGraffle to Word, there's severe pixellation - how can I get rid of this?



    (And no, printing from OG isn't an option - I need the images embedded amongst text rather than on their own pages)



    That's Word barfing on clipboard imports from non-MS sources. :P It's a known problem with Word.



    Try exporting the file in OmniGraffle to another format, such as jpg or pdf, then embedding that in Word manually. That should help.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    mike peelmike peel Posts: 185member
    Still not too much luck, sadly. By the looks of things, the main problem lies with the equation editor I'm using to label the images... See this image for what I mean.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Ick.



    Well, I don't know that I can help if MS's Equation Editor is screwing up with MS's Word... :P



    Oh, wait... are you editing equations in EE, importing over to OG, then moving back to Word?
  • Reply 7 of 7
    mike peelmike peel Posts: 185member
    I'm using MathMagic to make the equations, not equation editor. Sorry for the confusion there... I normally put these straight into Word, with no problems. But the program does regularity much up with other applications - I was trying to use MathMagic with TextEdit, but it kept changing the images to bitmap rather than vector. I'm guessing it's decided to do the same with OmniGraffle.



    Thanks for the help Kickaha; I'm now exporting the images as jpegs, then importing back into Word. And drooling at 10.3's expose feature as I'm doing so. It seems to be giving reasonable output, and I'll just have to hope that MathType 5 will work nicely with Omnigraffle when it comes out.



    Now I just need to find the money to buy a proper copy of OG at some point...
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