What is a good tool for creating railroad diagrams?

Question

I was very impressed by sqlite's syntax diagrams and was wondering if anyone could recommend software which would let me create similar graphs.

Answer 1

I would be surprised if SmartDraw can't do this - it has very few limitations in my experience.

Answer 2

I don't know any specific tools, but I can tell you they're often referred to as Recursive Transition Networks (RTNs). So you may be able to use this to expand your search.

You might also be able to get a response from the SQLite mailing list and find out exactly what they use.

Answer 3

I think it should be possible to define the RTN graph in Dot language and then generate with one of Dot-enabled tools.

Answer 4

You might be able to get close with RFFlow

Answer 5

If you use EBNF for your syntax, there is the EBNF Visualizer for this purpose.

You can also try Graphviz. It is open source and their exist several GUI tools for working with it. It is mostly useful for generic graphs but it can be adapted for syntax graphs too.

Another free tool called SYNGEN also exists.

Answer 6

There is a nice list on the Wikipedia article.

Here's one that is online, and seems to work quite well (albeit the text needs aliasing).

Answer 7

I use OpenOffice Draw for many of my drawing needs. Free, open-source, and multiplatform are the big things for me. It does a great job on flow charts with a small learning curve.

I've used SmartDraw before and found it very capable but my need for