I didn't think of trying pptx. But I don't much like manually drawing in such programs. I do like DrawIO, though. And it's fairly easy to convert those to Mermaid, which works well in Obsidian. Graphviz has always bothered me. I can never get *tight* drawings without a bunch of iterative tweaking. I'm sure it's user error.
I really like the idea of Penrose: https://github.com/penrose/penrose. But what I want is a Penrose decompiler. On 6/23/26 2:33 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Claude can write Powerpoint diagrams with python-pptx. I often (delegate use of) graphviz for network type diagrams. I tried the Microsoft Copilot capabilities in Powerpoint (Windows is more complete than Mac), and they aren't bad either. -----Original Message----- From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of glen Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2026 11:14 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [FRIAM] diagramming is hard So I had 3 Claude agents help me with a "gap analysis" on prepping a proposal, identifying where the customer may be missing content. Several iterations, multiple comparisons/contrasts, a little critique, etc. All that rigmarole used ~20% of my Claude Pro usage for that period. Then today, using only the 1 assistant, I asked it to help me clean up a diagram exported as XML (buttressed by a PNG export for it's "visual understanding"). That worked well, I think. But it used 24% of my allowance. Of course, XML is ... uh ... let's call it verbose, whereas the spreadsheet work operated directly on the ~4 sheet .xslx file. So that makes some sense. But it still seems a bit off. The gap analysis should require much more "reasoning" than the diagramming, right? I can't help but think a JEPA model would be better for diagramming.
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