On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 09:55:29PM +0000, James Freer wrote:
sience-electronics
Not sure what you find difficult about Dia - it's pretty much drag & drop. You can get documentation here: http://live.gnome.org/Dia http://live.gnome.org/Dia/Documentation and additional shapes here: http://dia-installer.de/shapes.html You can look at any of the additional shapes by clicking on the "more" link next to the shape info.
I've actually come back to dia now after playing with many of the others. I think the big advantage of dia is that it's a *drawing* program so it's philosophy is to make drawing things as easy as possible whereas many of the other programs have other priorities and thus their drawing abilities are second best.
After a bit of pain I have collected all the dia circuit, electrical and electronic symbols into one 'sheet' and I have made the default line have no arrow on it. I have also used it to create a special symbol I wanted. It's growing on me as a reasonably practical solution and, of course, I can use it for drawing other things (such as the layout of the instrument panel for which the circuit diagrams are for).
You can also create rather complex circuit diagrams in OpenOffice.org Draw, and then export the page to html. You'll have to hunt around a little for templates/gallery items, but there are plenty around. Here are a few for starters: http://csserver.evansville.edu/~richardson/projects/openoffice/html/electronic_template_usage.html http://csserver.evansville.edu/~richardson/projects/openoffice/ http://dsciences.free.fr/ (use google translator)
Why? The french is hardly difficult to follow! :-)
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/ (search on 'electronic' or 'circuit') http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=10160 (old, but a good start - check the forum for other similar)
These Open Office extensions look interesting too, I'd missed them first time around. I'm off to have a play with them.