#Graphviz layout engines free

Graphviz could be better in many ways, but at this point the prospects for that aren't great because AT&T isn't supporting the work as much as it did in the past and some of the authors (like me) have left to seek other work. So, there is absolutely no need to still be at the dot language or anything similar (in fact, I would be more than happy to throw away my dot files entirely, as there are much more hacks than actual graph-describing there).

Note: I don't care much about the format in which the graph should be input'd, as long as I can save and edit a file with the graph description (whatever is the language of such description).

#Graphviz layout engines free

So, what might be a good replacement of Graphviz? I really want it to be a free one.

Manually need to position edges and nodes.

Add a lot of hacks on input just because the tool is too stupid to see that it could swap two specific node to remove a crossing.

A graph with the minimum possible number of crossings.

Say what are the edges, possibly with style to be applied.

Define what the nodes are, possibly with style to be applied.

I want something that as, a user, I can simply: Trivial modifications somewhere in the graph, might perturb Graphviz heuristics, resulting in a completely different graph.

Sometimes, some edges makes very tortuous paths to connect the source node with the target node, featuring strange useless curves and a lot of superimposed laterally running edges.

It wastes a lot of space in the graph and at the same time overcrowd some places so very tightly.

It is very easy that in order to make small changes in one isolated place of the graph, Graphviz forces heavy major changes elsewhere, frequently invalidating hours of working trying to convince it do draw it right.

To do so, it is frequently needed to heavily hack the source file, probably screwing unrelated parts of the graph in the process.

If the user wants to, just say, swap the positions of two nodes.It has no reusable styling (like CSS), and you need to repeat the same personalizations in nodes and edges over, over, and over again.It superimposes different texts, making them unreadable.It always crossed edges that obviously could be drawn without a cross.It is a nice tools for small graphs.īut unfortunately, for large graphs, Graphviz really sucks: Running it with UMLClassDiagram-Plane.dot gives the following output: $ ~/sti/bin/macosx/gvlayout UMLClassDiagram-Plane.dot -Kdot -Txdot1.2 -o UMLClassDiagram-Plane-test.dotĮrror: UMLClassDiagram-Plane.In the past I used Graphviz to create drawing of graphs. Understand typically invokes it with the following arguments: gvlayout -Kdot -Txdot1.2 -o It’s a wrapper around the Graphviz library and uses the same command-line arguments as Graphviz. The relevant executable for laying out graphs is gvlayout. Understand includes several executables such as the Understand GUI and the command line tool und. After dismissing the error message, I exported the dot file: UMLClassDiagram-Plane.dot. With a project based on ArduPilot ArduPlane (version 4.0.9) the UML Class Diagram gave the previous error message when the Plane class was showing class details. Why did the graph fail?Īs an example, I’m going to use a recent bug report with the UML Class Diagram. The next step is to get a better error message. Specifically, you can export the dot file for the graph, even if no graph is visible. So, even after receiving an error message, you can interact with the graph window. The first thing to realize is only the layout failed. The following tips work for any of the Graphviz graphs, which is most of the graphs in Understand. dot export option, then the layout is done by Graphviz. There are several different layout engines in Understand. But what do you do when none of the suggestions work? The dialog itself has gotten a lot more descriptive over the years and contains several things to try. Have you ever seen this message when trying to generate a very complex graph in Understand? Abstract: An advanced workaround for visualizing graphs when the layout fails – and I use it to fix a bug in the UML Class Diagram.