Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with diagram

How do I create overlapping arrows in a circle (Illustrator)?

The Dutchman — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:40:23 -0800

What's the "right" way to create an arrows-in-a-circle diagram such as this one or these? The last post in that second link works (in Illustrator) if I then expand, ungroup, and bring the last arrowhead to the front...but it seems like a crude solution. Is there a better way? Illustrator seems like it's the right sofware for the job, but I'm open to other ideas, too. Thanks!

What was this website?

Kiwi — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 05:27:12 -0800

Looking for a (previously linked) musical-connections bubble-diagram. I think I saw this linked on Metafilter, maybe as a FPP, many moons ago.

It was basically a bubble diagram with musical groups linked together according to their similarity. So for example, Blur might be connected to The Kinks; Gorillaz; The Good, The Bad & The Queen; and further away, Oasis.

The diagram was zoomable and panable. Might have been Flash.

Any ideas what the website was?

Circuit Drawer

iconjack — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:37:04 -0800

Anybody know of any free software that will take my logic equations and make a circuit diagram? As an example, the following describes a circuit with three inputs and three outputs. I'd like to have this automatically drawn up with the usual symbols for and-gates, or-gates, and inverters. Of course the syntax can be anything similar to this.

Inputs X0, X1, X2; outputs Y0, Y1, Y2.

W = ! ( X0∙X1 + X1∙X2 + X2∙X0 )
Z = ! ( X0∙X1∙X2 + (X0 + X1 + X2)∙W )

Y0 = W∙(Z + X1 + X2) + Z∙X1∙X2
Y1 = W∙(Z + X0 + X2) + Z∙X0∙X2
Y2 = W∙(Z + X0 + X1) + Z∙X0∙X1

Print to fit in Microsoft Publisher

Horace Rumpole — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:01:05 -0800

How do I make an extremely large (100 inches wide) Publisher document print to fit on a single page? I am curating an exhibition, and a colleague of mine used Microsoft Publisher (a program I have zero experience with) to make diagrams of where my items should be laid out within each of the 10 display cases. In order to make the layouts as accurate as possible, she did everything at full scale, which works great, but Publisher wants to print it out at the size of the physical display case (like Stephen Wright's joke about the 1:1 scale map of the world).

There doesn't seem to be an obvious "print to fit" kind of button anywhere that I can find. I've tried saving it as a tif or jpeg, but it says the file size is too large. I converted it to a PDF, but it came up as a totally fragmented 70-page document. Any suggestions better than the kludge we've come up with so far, taking a screenshot and printing that?

Radio has no future! - Lord Kelvin

mikw — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:21:22 -0800

Where can I buy a discontinued 11C90 650 MHz prescaler? This is for reverse engineering a SR-2020 mystery receiver that a friend of mine has been working on. Any information on this will be very much appreciated. Bonus hand drawn analog circuit diagrams. There's some more numbers associated with the 11C90 however I'm not sure what they mean: U5.75H90. It appears to be discontinued sometime in 2001, however I can only find these for sale in bulk quantities. I'm really just after one or two of these, not a giant stack. The photo set is of a mystery receiver being reverse engineered by a friend of mine. It appears to be of military origin and it and a twin were purchased in Australia at a junk sale. He's been working on it for a number of years as a hobby and has managed to coax quite a bit of life out of it. He'd be extremely interested in any information, no matter how oblique.

Anyone remember a site with a handful of diagrams depicting a workgroup's interactions with git?

moift — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:05:35 -0800

Anyone remember a site with a handful of diagrams depicting a workgroup's interactions with git? I'm finding a lot of individual workflow diagrams on google, but this one showed a few possible ways a whole team might structure their git process. One, for example, had a bunch of people committing to a gatekeeper who was responsible for merging to the master branch. I can't remember what the others were, which is why I'd like to see it again.

I think I saw it on reddit originally.

Where can I find repair manuals and exploded diagrams for valve amplifiers?

stackhaus23 — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:59:16 -0800

Where can I find repair manuals and exploded diagrams for valve amplifiers online? A while ago, I needed to find a repair manual for a vintage Twin Lens Reflex camera... then come across a website that had PDF after PDF of scans of exploded diagrams of cameras of all ages. Since I knew exactly what I was looking for it wasn't too hard to find.

However, I now need to find similar diagrams for valve amplifiers. I just need to see what they look like inside but since I know nothing about them... I don't really know what I'm looking for.

Ideally I'd be looking for guitar amplifiers but anything that has big glass valves that glow and make things louder would be suitable.

Where to buy blood splatter posters?

Joakim Ziegler — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:48:20 -0800

Where can I find blood splatter posters, or other technical diagrams/posters, to decorate my office? I was just watching an episode of "Dexter", and the main characters, who's a blood splatter analyst with the Miami PD, has several posters of blood splatter examples in his office. One is divided into several smaller images, showing blood drops aither in different states of running, or at different angles, another has what looks like a drag pattern.

I'd like to get some of these posters for my office. Where can I get them? Preferably somewhere that ships internationally and accepts international credit cards. Other highly specialized/weird technical posters and diagrams in poster form might be interesting too, areas like medicine, forensics, science, architecture, etc.

Web app alternative to OmniGraffle/Visio?

Hypocrites — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:59:28 -0800

Is there a web app that lets you diagram like you would in OmniGraffle or Visio?

gps module circuit diagram needed

raphael19 — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:56:15 -0800

can you help me locate a circuit diagram of a gps module on internet? title says it all.

i googled and searched but could not find any sources. is it top secret or am i not looking close enough? the ones i have found are gps kits with already commercially available modules. but i want the module itself.

NYC Cheap Old Graphic Instructional Books

shownomercy — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 07:51:14 -0800

Where to find retro science/school books on the cheap in NYC and Brooklyn? Think martin denny, for your fase. I never got into the whole combing used books thing here--maybe too overwhelming. Now I am in dire need of some kitschy, 1960s-80s era instructional books, school books, anything with pictures or diagrams, cheap and valueless enough to cut up for scans.

And while online book shopping isn't as good for this kind of thing, maybe someone has reccomendations online too?

What's the best way to create a large, complex, flexible UML diagram?

grumblebee — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 10:54:45 -0800

I need to spec out a huge, complex application in UML. I'm looking for good tools/techniques to do this in a fluid situation, where there are a ton of classes and new ones will be added all the time. My team is going to write a gargantuan program. We need to spec it, and I'm expecting we'll spend two or three weeks on the spec, before writing a line of code. It's vital that the finished spec be clear, rational, utilitarian and scalable. I've gotten to that point before, on other projects, but never on one this large. And my way of getting there is to make many drafts of the spec.

During draft stages, I continually refine the spec by adding new classes, removing redundant ones, etc. So the entire UML chart needs to be revised maybe 50 times before it's done.

The only UML tools I've used are graphical-UI ones, where you have to draw little boxes and drag connectors between them. But the thought of doing that on this project makes me queasy. It would mean continually dragging tons of boxes around to make space for new ones.

Here's what I'd like:

-- a way to create the graph via XML or something similar. The XML could be fed into an application that would spit out a diagram.

-- the XML/outline/whatever is easy to modify, in terms of adding new classes, relationships, etc.

-- when done, we could PRINT the whole diagram as a giant chart which we could hang on the wall. I guess it would have to be on many sheets of paper that we'd tape together. But we'd really like to be able to view the entire model at once.

Does such an app exist? If not, I'm very open to analog approaches. Is there a good method of doing something like this with tons of index cards (one for each class) tacked to the wall or something?

I'm sure other teams have faced this problem. How have the solved it?

We're Mac and Linux based, but if the best solution is PC-only, we could go that way via parallels.

If it matters (and I'm not sure why it would), this will be a web app coded in Actionscript 3.0.

if ($picture=(words*1000)) {$animation="even better"} else FAIL

datacenter refugee — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:57:07 -0800

I have a large, multi-step logical diagram that needs to become a slick presentation. How do I get there? I have a multi-page Visio file that illustrates the growth of a system over a period of time. Each page represents a single change to the same environment (additions, deletions, node re-purposing) and each successive change builds upon the previous page. The intended effect is a timeline of getting from point A to point B in n steps. The problem is the complexity of the changes alters the environment so dramatically that step 2 may look nothing like step 1 when illustrated statically. The result: Geeks get it, executives look out the window and doodle.

I'd like to solve this problem by moving from a series of static pages to a fluid animation that can be narrated instead of annotated. Instead of a node just 'appearing' in a successive step, I'd like that node to pop up and displace / connect to its neighbors in a very obvious manner. This requires a new format.

I know what I HAVE to do, it's the HOW that I'm missing - namely, what application to use. The diagram is large (>1024x768 to be readable), so any output format would need to be near HD resolution. Flash would be ideal, but recreating the diagram would take DAYS. I could import to powerpoint and do animations, but the native ppt resolution is too small to capture all of the minutia. MS movie maker and photo story lack the ability to work with objects so they're not really options. Any suggestions?

Are there any programs that allow one to draw graphs (plots/charts) using a visual interface?

lunchbox — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:08:37 -0800

Are there any programs that allow one to draw graphs (plots/charts) using a visual interface? I'd like to draw some graphs (i.e. on a cartesian plane) to demonstrate some concepts visually in presentations. My plots would be of fairly simple functions -- linear, sinusoidal, exponential, polynomial, logistic, etc.. I know there are a million programs that allow one to enter functions and graph them using a command line (such as Mathematica), but I'd like to do this visually, so that I could easily, say, drag a function onto my chart, stretch/compress/shift it, add in labels and dotted lines, and make functions intersect where I want them to. Think of the types of diagrams you see in an introductory economics textbook; those are the types of diagrams I want to make. Any ideas?

diagram this 94-word sentence

mai — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:41:44 -0800

How do I diagram this sentence? Here is the sentence in question:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

This sentence won the bad writing contest in 1998. Googling reveals several ways of diagramming sentences. I want to diagram it the way a contemporary linguist would, but I'm not sure exactly what that is.

Where can I find free muscle-group and skeleton diagrams online?

stungeye — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 08:18:48 -0800

Infographilter: Where can I find free muscle-group and skeletal diagrams online? My wife is enrolled in a personal-trainer course and needs to learn the major muscle groups, and the human skeletal structure.

Hi-res diagrams we can print on a inkjet-plotter would be ideal.