[HN Gopher] Create diagrams with code using Graphviz
___________________________________________________________________
Create diagrams with code using Graphviz
Author : adrianancona
Score : 502 points
Date : 2020-06-10 09:03 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ncona.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ncona.com)
| magjac wrote:
| Great article. You might also have use for
| http://magjac.com/graphviz-visual-editor/ and the new
| https://forum.graphviz.org
| databasher wrote:
| I use GraphViz to produce a visual, browsable version of the NIEM
| data model. GraphViz can output images and HTML maps, which
| allows easy building of clickable web pages with hover notes.
|
| See the diagram at https://niem.github.io/model/4.2/nc/ItemType/
| . Hover over a term to see its definition. Click on a term to
| navigate to its diagram.
| lalo2302 wrote:
| What I've been craving for is a way to respect the order of the
| nodes when being drawn. Since currently it re-orders them to
| occupy less space.
|
| With this I would be able to finish my data flow diagram out of a
| functional programming project. To describe in a visual way how
| the function calls are happening.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Isn't the point of data flow that the order doesn't matter?
| Otherwise it's control flow isn't it? I use GraphViz to render
| both data flow and control flow without issue https://engineeri
| ng.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/understand....
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Graphviz works great with LaTeX. It removes the pain point of
| moving your workflow out of LaTeX.
| ciceryadam wrote:
| https://github.com/mingrammer/diagrams - uses graphviz under the
| hood, and it's super easy to extend the list of available nodes.
| Also you can tweak it with node/edge/graph attributes to fit in
| your style/needs.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| RIP NetViz (90s - 2015) Back then it was one of the first to link
| with a db of nodes to auto update diagrams the job I'm thinking
| of had thousands of sites & it saved so much work once you had
| templates set up.
| FarhadG wrote:
| Been super interested to write my own layout engine. Does anyone
| have resources, tutorials, etc. that I should look into if
| someone wants to write the layout engine that powers something
| like GraphViz?
| suyjuris wrote:
| I was looking into that a while ago, but sadly I did not find
| anything great. Back then I wanted to draw animated Binary
| Decision Diagrams, so I had to come with an incremental (and
| simple and fast) layout algorithm, which could determine
| positions for new nodes without interfering with the original
| graph. The result works fine, but it did require a fair amount
| of tweaking. (The comments document these tweaks extensively
| [1].)
|
| If you want to write something more general, then that would
| probably be much more complicated.
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/suyjuris/obst/blob/feb8e766ce226ca1afe862...
| graphviz wrote:
| We're reluctant to be exposed to too much anger about misfeatures
| in 20 year old code that was basically a prototype that escaped
| from the lab, but go ahead, ask us anything.
|
| We've gotten a lot of help lately from Magnus Jacobssen, Matthew
| Fernandez and Mark Hansen on cleaning up the website and the code
| base, even some persistent bugs we could never find ourselves.
|
| Improvements that would benefit the community the most?
|
| - better default styles that don't look like troff from 1985
|
| - better default layout parameters in neato than statistical
| multidimensional scaling based on shortest path
|
| - more expressive graph language with classes or templates
|
| - more robust handling of error conditions like out of memory
|
| - better documentation to help people find useful tools or just
| know what they should be looking for
|
| - find someone to donate a generic orthogonal routing algorithm
| based on a modern algorithm since people want this
|
| - it would be a big effort, but move the core algorithms to a
| framework that supports interaction with layout generation
|
| Hope this makes sense.
| enriquto wrote:
| Better integration with TeX, I want to put formulas inside the
| graph using the exact same fonts as in the rest of my paper.
| zackees wrote:
| Hey there, I'm the owner of webgraphviz.com and I am totally
| excited to see that it made it to the front page of
| hackernews!!
|
| THANK YOU for making this wonderful program.
|
| Also special thanks to the emscripten team for their wonderful
| transcompiler.
|
| I am constantly amazed at all the WONDERFUL software that
| exists on unix as single threaded applications (required for
| emscriptem asm.js output). There could be a whole sub-culture
| of webdev which uses these old unix programs. I feel like it's
| an untapped resource, truly.
| karatestomp wrote:
| I'd rather have graphviz expose a kind of layout engine such
| that it can take the size each node will occupy (determined by
| whatever's going to draw them) and use that to create a layout,
| feeding path info to something that can handle the actual
| drawing, than have more drawing options in Graphviz itself. I
| think that doing so is (so far as I could tell, last time I
| tried) extremely awkward at best is why it's not embedded in
| basically everything that has any need whatsoever to draw
| graphs.
|
| So, I guess:
|
| > - it would be a big effort, but move the core algorithms to a
| framework that supports interaction with layout generation
|
| If that's what you mean by that.
|
| It'd make it _way_ easier to pretty up Graphviz output. I 'd
| rather have "renderer" applications that run on top of Graphviz
| and have Graphviz itself lose all but its most basic build-in
| drawing capabilities, than have more of that built into
| Graphviz itself.
| Karliss wrote:
| I have used Graphviz that way. It wasn't too bad. The most
| annoying part was inconsistency in input and output units.
| Some properties expect values in pixels, some are in inches,
| and dpi for input and output are different with only one of
| them being configurable. Otherwise code was quite straight-
| forward: create context, create nodes, create edges, set
| attributes, run layout, read positions and edge path
| coordinates, do the cleanup.
| derefr wrote:
| One problem with this is that--at least in some Graphviz
| layout engines--"the size each node is going to occupy" is
| chosen to minimize the energy/stress of the graph, sort of
| like how line breaks on TeX pages are chosen to optimize for
| whole-page metrics.
|
| For example, in a graph with only two nodes, where each node
| contains a long text string, there is no "pressure" on the
| nodes, so the default result might be to not break the text,
| creating two wide, short node-boxes, and then to arrange them
| with one above the other. Whereas if you have many such nodes
| in a densely-connected web, the text in them will likely be
| wrapped in order to make the nodes more box-shaped, so that
| nodes can fit between the cuts of the pairwise-acute
| spirograph-like edge lines.
|
| In order to resolve this sort of layout, Graphviz has to
| understand a lot of things about fonts, padding, and borders
| (just like TeX does.) It's already doing "rendering" at that
| point, even if the result gets thrown away.
| pspeter3 wrote:
| I'm excited for better default styles and colors. I love the
| text editing experience of Graphviz but spend a lot of time
| trying to style it unfortunately.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I love graphviz and have used it as part of my job for over 15
| years.
|
| That said, I have spent entirely too much time manually
| searching through the 100-odd dimensional Graphviz parameter
| space trying to get aesthetic results. So much time in fact
| that occasionally it's easier to fire up Omnigraph and draw the
| thing manually.
|
| Graphviz would be ideal if it had some kind of meta-parameter
| settings that could reduce the tendency of its output to
| resemble an unreadable rats nest when the number of nodes
| exceeds about 20. I know that's part of the point of neato vs.
| dot, and that some parameters _are_ effectively meta-
| parameters, but Graphviz still needs a better "porcelain" (in
| git-speak) with fewer dimensions.
| haolez wrote:
| Sincerely, I think graphviz is great the way it is. I wouldn't
| change the graph language and most of the suggested changes
| would be "nice to have".
|
| Thanks for your hard work on it!
| gmfawcett wrote:
| Agreed 100%. I don't care if graphviz looks a bit dated --
| it's straightforward and easy to generate. (I wouldn't say
| "no" to having more layout algorithms, though!)
|
| My favourite personal use of Graphviz: A few years ago I
| inherited a large, legacy codebase that was very hard to
| understand -- full of global state modified from dozens of
| functions, obscure function names, etc. I used a C parser
| (forget which one) to convert the code to a set of ASTs, and
| then hacked up a Web-based, interactive graph generator,
| using Graphviz to create the interactive SVGs. The "app" let
| you click on a function (node) and zoom in to examine its
| callers, callees, global accesses, global mutations, etc.,
| with a "radius" parameter to decide how much of the large
| graph you wanted to see. Every node was clickable, and would
| ask the Web app to generate a new graph centered on that
| node.
|
| It was an awful, throwaway hack, and was only about 90%
| accurate due to parsing/preprocessor challenges. (At times I
| resorted to annotating the code with magic comments to
| facilitate graph generation -- not a sustainable approach.)
| But a day spent hacking with Graphviz dramatically improved
| my learning rate, and it was also useful in helping describe
| the code to others.
| Dayshine wrote:
| > - find someone to donate a generic orthogonal routing
| algorithm based on a modern algorithm since people want this
|
| > - it would be a big effort, but move the core algorithms to a
| framework that supports interaction with layout generation
|
| Yup, I think these are the ones that mean I never actually end
| up using Graphviz for anything :)
|
| If I'm generating graphs, I want them laid out in a
| hierarchical style.
|
| To do that, I need a library which can do that layout.
|
| Those libraries are often written in a higher level language
| like C#, Java, etc, which come with their own simple drawing
| layer.
|
| And then I don't need Graphviz anymore! (not that I'm
| suggesting graphviz should change)
| bmh100 wrote:
| I'm curious to know which libraries you use.
|
| Also, in my own experience, I was able to get hierarchical
| layouts Graphviz by using directional graphs with subgraphs.
| criddell wrote:
| So what library do you use for hierarchical layouts?
| fermienrico wrote:
| > - better default styles that don't look like troff from 1985
|
| Design is not something that should be tied to a particular
| decade. It's not fashion. Good design is timeless and only
| adopts to new technologies/media. Design is how well a
| particular solution works for the purpose of it. If it looks
| like 1985 and works well, there is absolutely no reason to
| change it. If it doesn't, then there is no need to look at
| "modern trends", instead we need to go back to the drawing
| board and find out what the _problem_ is first.
|
| Can you identify the problem with the design besides the
| superficial aesthetic (which can be easily themed)?
| thecupisblue wrote:
| > Design is how well a particular solution works for the
| purpose of it
|
| That's one half. The other one is how people feel while using
| it. 1985 aesthetic makes people feel bad. Thus design is half
| bad. Or, for you maybe, half good.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Speak for yourself; some of us think computer aesthetics
| peaked by the 90s ;)
| optimuspaul wrote:
| and some of us are still waiting for aesthetics to reach
| computers ;)
| jakear wrote:
| > it's not fashion
|
| Many would argue good fashion is timeless as well. A good
| chunk of haute couture from decades past would be seen as
| modern and appealing today. (Which is why the houses like to
| repackage and ship them as such...)
| fermienrico wrote:
| I disagree, accordingly Wikipedia:
|
| > Fashion is a popular aesthetic expression at a particular
| time, place and in a specific context, especially in
| clothing, footwear, lifestyle, accessories, makeup,
| hairstyle, and body proportions.
|
| Fashion is inexplicably linked to a particular time. Just
| like Art - Art evolves with time and it is part of the
| culture, current events, etc.
|
| Design is not (unless you want to include say media as it
| changes through time. For e.g. print -> digital media).
| smnrchrds wrote:
| > Design is not something that should be tied to a particular
| decade.
|
| Design does not exist in a vacuum. Technological progress,
| for example, creates the need for design change. Microsoft's
| switch from a serif to a sans serif font as the default
| typeface for Word was a good move, because we rarely print
| documents anymore and a the best design for print is not the
| same as the best design for screens.
|
| 20th century physics books had a distinct design for
| illustrations. It was beautiful and functional. But it was
| also designed around the limitations of their eventual
| monochrome (not even greyscale) print. A 2020 textbook does
| not have the same limitations and should not be designed with
| the same set of constraints.
| 13415 wrote:
| No critique from me, instead a big thanks from me to you and
| anyone else who worked on graphviz!
|
| I've used it a few times for visualizing aspects of my
| research, usually by writing .dot files directly from Racket.
| It turned out to be quite useful.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Anger, what's wrong with people? For the record, I love
| graphviz. Thanks!
| t-writescode wrote:
| I have been nothing but happy to use graphviz and recommend it
| regularly. Thank you for all of your work, truly.
| jcims wrote:
| Been using graphviz on and off for ~20^H^H15 years (seems like
| 20) and it was my introduction to graph theory and concepts.
| Just wanted to thank the team for maintaining an incredibly
| useful and versatile tool.
| wnoise wrote:
| > look like troff from 1985
|
| This is a feature, not a bug.
|
| The rest would be nice to have, though.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I was thinking something similar. The default styles don't
| look super shiny, I suppose, but they are clean, which I
| appreciate. All in all, I think it does a good job of
| supporting my main reason for choosing graphviz over
| something like Visio: It encourages me to get the
| illustration done and then get on with my day without getting
| caught up with trying to make everything perfect.
|
| I will turn to Visio if I need to make something
| presentation-quality, so there's that.
|
| I have similar feelings about the lack of ability to fine-
| tune the layout: I've started seeing it as a feature, because
| it gives me a great feedback mechanism: If the graph is too
| complicated for Graphviz to lay out nicely, I take that as a
| sign that the thing the graph represents needs to be
| simplified. I've even gone so far as to incorporate Graphviz
| into my definition of done for a refactoring project: I kept
| a dotfile representing the current state of the dependency
| graph, and stopped refactoring when the rendered graph
| stopped making my eyes water.
| tmaly wrote:
| I just want to say thank you for releasing this. I have been
| using graphviz since 2008. It is part of an internal tool to
| visualize information in the financial industry. It has been a
| life saver.
| davidgerard wrote:
| I heartily recommend the Graphviz plugin for MediaWiki.
|
| Also, http://www.webgraphviz.com/
| kmstout wrote:
| I've gotten a lot of mileage from Graphviz over the years. As an
| example outside of work, I wanted a way to depict parse trees for
| an article I was writing. So, after I wrote an EBNF parser
| generator (great fun!), I wrote a little utility to apply a
| grammar to stdin and emit to stdout a JSON representation of the
| resulting parse tree; another utility handles converting the JSON
| to dot, which I can plot at my leisure.
|
| https://github.com/reindeereffect/tools-from-blog/tree/maste...
| jjice wrote:
| I was writing a parser recently, and I was fed up with having
| to look at a textual tree output. I did a bit of Googling,
| found Graphviz, and I had the whole thing working in like 15
| minutes. I think it's absolutely essential to me now anytime I
| work with trees/graphs that I need to visualize.
| mendeza wrote:
| Great tutorial! Is there a way to extract the bounding box of
| nodes, and the endpoints of lines? This would be useful to
| generate ML models to automatically parse graphs!
| npiit wrote:
| Graphviz is for noobs. Try TikZ, aka the Gigachad of vector
| graphics. I spent more time creating TikZ diagrams than actually
| writing my whole MSc. thesis.
| enriquto wrote:
| > Graphviz is for noobs. Try TikZ, aka the Gigachad of vector
| graphics.
|
| Maybe you are right, in today's decaying world. But any
| civilized person can see that tikz, latex and even graphviz are
| all ultimately hipster tools. Real men of course use pic and
| troff.
| npiit wrote:
| Now, 28 year old me after leaving academia and learning the
| superpower of TikZ, LaTeX and Beamer, I just use draw.io and
| google docs/slides.
| enriquto wrote:
| the horror, the horror
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I don't believe TikZ does any kind of automatic layout - that's
| what most people use Graphviz for I believe.
| jandrese wrote:
| > I spent more time creating TikZ diagrams than actually
| writing my whole MSc. thesis.
|
| Isn't this the primary problem with TikZ? It makes you do all
| the time consuming layout stuff by hand. With Graphviz you just
| chuck your data at it and get results instantly. Sure it won't
| be eye-optimized, but it also didn't require work on your part,
| nor will it require more work on your part when your data
| changes.
| tejtm wrote:
| DOT all the things!
|
| (simple) Makefiles [0] XML [1] Json [2]
|
| [0] https://github.com/TomConlin/MakefileViz [1]
| https://github.com/TomConlin/xpath2dot [2]
| https://github.com/TomConlin/json_to_paths
| simonsarris wrote:
| If you need a library with a _lot_ more power out of the box
| (interaction tools, undo manager, data binding, lots of layouts,
| and many more visualization options), I make GoJS:
| https://gojs.net/latest/index.html
|
| It's not free, however, though you can use the evaluation version
| indefinitely if you wanted to make your own graphs for personal
| use.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| I'm going to hijack this thread to ask if anyone knows of a
| library that creates "hand drawn"-style sequence diagrams from
| code? I basically want this: https://bramp.github.io/js-sequence-
| diagrams/ -- but sadly, this one only seems to run inside a
| browser.
| fsiefken wrote:
| there must be away to run it in a headless browser en
| screencapture and parse the output as png
| AlexITC wrote:
| Actually, it's pretty simple, just include
| https://github.com/markushedvall/plantuml-encoder and call
| "https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/img/" + encode(text);
|
| That's what I did on collabuml.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| Surely there is. It just seems overly complicated to me.
| pbsds wrote:
| This one is also web-based, but it takes graphviz source:
| https://sketchviz.com/new
| mpk wrote:
| PlantUML supports this https://plantuml.com/handwritten
|
| Add this to any diagram to get the effect you want,
| skinparam handwritten true skinparam monochrome true
|
| Demo: https://tinyurl.com/ycdu7owa
| kristiandupont wrote:
| Thank you
| AlexITC wrote:
| Also, you can use https://collabuml.com to collaboratively
| build diagrams.
| hnarayanan wrote:
| One interesting thing is that graphviz can output to many
| formats, including SVG. This makes it great for websites, where
| one can later do things like later tweak the colours on the fly.
|
| e.g. https://harishnarayanan.org/writing/kubernetes-django/
| vidarh wrote:
| Many years ago I wrote an XSL file that uses the Graphviz SVG
| output and applies gradients and shadows (the repo also has a
| couple of tiny tools that output graphviz graphs):
|
| https://github.com/vidarh/diagram-tools/tree/master
| lihaoyi wrote:
| Being SVG also means you can style them via CSS, allowing
| simple interactivity. For example, you can make graph edges
| change color or become thicker when you mouse over them, making
| it easier to follow edges in a large messy graph
| josteink wrote:
| SVGs created by GraphViz (and possibly in general?) also has
| the benefit of being searchable within a browser, etc.
|
| So if you have a huge diagram and want to find a node of
| interest, with a SVG, it's only a quick CTRL-F away.
| dan199 wrote:
| I find plantuml a more useful abstraction for software stuff
| (uses graphviz under the covers)
|
| https://plantuml.com/
| RobinL wrote:
| At ObservbleHQ they use this to automatically visualise
| dependencies: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/notebook-
| visualizer
|
| More generally, Observable gives you a 'playground' where you can
| interactively see graphviz results:
| https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/graphviz
|
| Another option - which for some applications is visually more
| appealing - is Elk:
| https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/notebook-visualizer-e...
|
| There's a simple start notebook here:
| https://observablehq.com/@tmcw/elk
| jetrink wrote:
| I found a great use for Graphviz recently. I needed to implement
| a model that was created by a scientist with no programming
| experience outside of a Fortran class in the early 1980s.
| Meanwhile, I didn't have much knowledge of the subject matter or
| terminology. The model was described in a multipage Excel file
| and an accompanying PDF and I implemented it in Clojure.
|
| In order to help us communicate, I wrote a script that built a
| data-dependency graph directly from the code and produced a
| diagram with Graphviz for the scientist to review. It helped us
| to catch a couple errors resulting from my misinterpretations and
| it gave the scientist confidence that the code accurately
| reflected his design.
| Heliosmaster wrote:
| Also i think it's a great use case for the data-drivenness of
| clojure :)
| truculent wrote:
| I have used rather nice clojure library that also uses graphviz
| under the bonnet, with great success:
|
| https://github.com/Engelberg/ubergraph
|
| Did you use something similar or roll your own?
|
| In any case, your project sounds great and I am glad it was a
| success.
| jetrink wrote:
| I used Rhizome[1]. (It looks like it is no longer being
| maintained, but I didn't run into any issues.)
|
| 1. https://github.com/ztellman/rhizome
| macintux wrote:
| That's fantastic. You should write a blog post on that.
| tetris11 wrote:
| There's an Emacs package which also uses Graphviz in the same
| way to show function dependencies during development:
|
| https://github.com/mtekman/elisp-depmap.el
| jxramos wrote:
| Navigation is very important too for large graphs. Go with yEd
| instead and graphml, networkx is great too
| https://networkx.github.io/documentation/stable/reference/re...
| sevensor wrote:
| I really like graphviz for visualizing the call graphs generated
| by the Python profiler.
| machawinka wrote:
| I have used it to visualize dependency trees for several thousand
| nodes and show my team loops and broken deps. For this kind of
| situations, a picture is better than a thousand lines of code.
| ppsreejith wrote:
| One of my favourite online graphviz editors for quickly creating
| something is: https://dreampuf.github.io/GraphvizOnline/
| kinow wrote:
| Great post. I've used it to generate UML diagrams from databases
| with sqlalchemy, and more recently to generate protobuf diagrams
| in Python (needed it quickly to update some documentation):
| https://github.com/kinow/protobuf-uml-diagram
|
| One thing that I think was not mentioned in the article, are
| invisible nodes, which are really handy:
| https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=invisible+node+%5Bgraphvi...
|
| Some times the existing layouts, ranks, clusters, etc, won't help
| you to produce the diagram you have in your mind. So instead of
| giving up and drawing it in draw.io or Inkspace (which I used to
| do), a co-worker showed me how he was using this technique in
| several of his diagrams.
| bollu wrote:
| There seems to be somewhat of a myth that it's hard to get
| GraphViz diagrams to "look nice". I (obviously biased) feel that
| the diagrams I generated for my reference implementation of RETE
| look quite clean: https://github.com/bollu/rete#example-rete-
| diagrams-to-learn...
| bvrmn wrote:
| The instant place to look for graphviz issues is a distance
| between arrow head/tail to node. But yes your diagrams are very
| clean indeed!
| typpo wrote:
| I run a web service "QuickChart" that renders Graphviz charts to
| PNG/SVG so you can easily bring graphviz diagrams into a web app
| or spreadsheet. Some Graphviz fans may find it useful (it's
| intended as a replacement for the old Google Image Charts
| graphviz renderer).
| https://quickchart.io/chart?cht=gv&chl=<DOT here>
|
| e.g. https://quickchart.io/chart?cht=gv&chl=digr
| aph%20MyGraph%20%7Bbegin%20-%3E%20end%7D
|
| The service is open source: https://github.com/typpo/quickchart
| alexchantavy wrote:
| For Python I love using Pyan
| (https://github.com/davidfraser/pyan, though I'm not sure this is
| the main repo but it's the first result on Google and it seems to
| work fine). My workflow is
|
| cd ~/projectdir pyan3 path/to/file/i/want.py --uses --no-defines
| --colored --grouped --annotated --dot > dotfile.dot dot -Tsvg
| dotfile.dot > diagram.svg
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| How convenient, I just added graphviz support to my Pandoc
| filter, pandoc-plot. It renders graphviz code blocks into graphs
| (also works with other plotting toolkits).
|
| https://github.com/LaurentRDC/pandoc-plot
| leephillips wrote:
| I use this quite often. Graphviz and the dot language are really
| useful tools. Here is my roundup of a collection of free-software
| network graphing tools:
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/639998/
| buserror wrote:
| I use graphviz a lot; here I generate a 'call graph' of the
| codebase of simavr[0] as a pdf for example [1]. But I also use it
| for introspection for complex data structure.
|
| [0]: http://github.com/buserror/simavr [1]:
| https://github.com/buserror/simavr/blob/master/doc/simavr_ca...
| yboris wrote:
| This is excellent! Thank you for the share!
|
| I'm working on a Typescript Call Graph [0] and am leaning
| towards D3 for my visualization. But I hope I can generate
| something as pretty and useful as your link [1]
|
| [0]: https://github.com/whyboris/TypeScript-Call-Graph
| mthoms wrote:
| Nice. This will be useful, I'm looking forward to it.
|
| Are you aware of any similar tools for creating class
| diagrams from TS code?
| yboris wrote:
| The closest I found was TS-Call-Graph [0] which works well
| but only on _classes_ while mine is aimed at _functions_
|
| I have a very rough draft of a graph working [1] (currently
| hardcoded with a specific function name) but I intend to
| make it interactive and to have more than one visualization
| of the files.
|
| [0] https://github.com/Deskbot/TS-Call-Graph
|
| [1] https://github.com/whyboris/TypeScript-Call-
| Graph/pull/1
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Still remember learning to generate dot by lisp in the book
| learning lisp one game at a time.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I like Graphviz, but it's sad that we get such a tiny selection
| of graph-drawing algorithms to go with it. For instance, I don't
| see a way to draw a force-directed layout that also tries to
| account for edge direction, like a more flexible version of
| _dot_.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mv4 wrote:
| Used Graphviz to visualize gstreamer pipelines, and it was
| awesome for the task.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You might as well just use something like plantUML instead of
| this from a productivity standpoint.
|
| However, I don't want to discount the value of Graphviz. Python
| has a little known class diagram generator built into pylint
| which uses Graphviz for its rendering and its pretty cool. You
| can find out just how bad your #BIGCORPS code architecture is
| just by checking a reasonably large project with Pylints class
| diagraming tool...
| Schiphol wrote:
| I like graphviz a lot, but I almost always end up using
| [Tikz](http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/graphics/pgf/), which is
| quite a bit more flexible.
|
| One huge advantage of Tikz is that you can use LaTeX equations
| natively. E.g. subscripts and superscripts in graphviz involve
| jumping through a few hoops, iirc.
| pletnes wrote:
| Does it have graph-drawing included?
| kragen wrote:
| Yes, part of TikZ is a clone of Graphviz, but implemented in
| LaTeX.
| mkl wrote:
| And Lua for the more advanced layout calculations, which
| need LuaLaTeX.
| Schiphol wrote:
| That's one of its main uses. One thing it does not do (or I
| don't know how) and graphviz does, though, is arranging nodes
| intelligently so as to minimize clutter and edge distances.
| That's one of the nice things in graphviz.
| enriquto wrote:
| > One thing it does not do (or I don't know how) and
| graphviz does, though, is arranging nodes intelligently
|
| That's exactly what "graph drawing" means [0]. Can tikz
| choose the position of the vertices itself or you have to
| specify the positions yourself? If it is you who chooses
| the positions, then tikz does not do "graph drawing".
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_drawing
| mkl wrote:
| Yes, TikZ can position the vertices itself. E.g.
| http://www.tcs.uni-
| luebeck.de/downloads/papers/2011/2011-con...
| http://www.tcs.uni-
| luebeck.de/downloads/mitarbeiter/tantau/2...
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/203692/how-to-
| automa...
| enriquto wrote:
| That's great! Did these people really implement graph
| drawing algorithms as latex macros, or does it call an
| external program? I'm afraid to look it myself, lest I
| discover the truth.
| mkl wrote:
| Some of it is LaTeX, but the more intensive algorithms
| are done with embedded Lua, using LuaLaTeX. There is no
| external program.
| nyir wrote:
| Wow, that was a long time ago, very fun project to work
| on. But yeah, without deep knowledge of the TeX side
| you'd likely still struggle a bit to understand how the
| two sides interact, at least it was a bit of a struggle
| for me, maybe / hopefully it got a bit better in the
| meantime.
|
| And thankfully LuaLaTex was ready enough at that time, I
| can't imagine how bad it would've been to do this in pure
| Tex ...
| enriquto wrote:
| Are you one of the authors of tikz graphdrawing?
| nyir wrote:
| Just a former student who participated in the first
| version (let's say draft) of it, which had no really
| interesting algorithms in it yet, just the overall graph
| framework and integration with the rest of PGF/TikZ.
|
| Really cool project though, one of the few that made it
| outside of uni.
| [deleted]
| zero37z wrote:
| It would be nice, if they add theme effect like a game called
| Detroit become human
| brasetvik wrote:
| Big fan of graphviz.
|
| Lots of interesting tools that use it being posted here, so
| here's a toy of mine: https://github.com/alexbrasetvik/graphspec
|
| I've used it mostly to mix edge+node definitions in comments in
| asciidoc or code, and the non-nested nature makes it easy to
| compose different sources of edges and nodes.
|
| (It's just a POC. If you know of something similar that's more
| actively developed, I'd be very interested)
| abathur wrote:
| I'm also interested in this (or something more actively-
| developed), as it's the first time I've seen what looks like an
| answer to a question I've had recently.
|
| If it helps to know how someone else thinks about it: I've been
| looking for a way to _compose_ or _import_ or _include_ a graph
| or subgraph defined in one file into multiple other graphs.
| I've started to assume I'll just need a preprocessor or
| template engine.
|
| In my case, I'm interested in the feasibility of building a
| really big interactive chart, like a decision tree or
| differential diagnosis chart, to help users discover
| docs/examples/tools/tutorials etc. that can meet their needs or
| fix their problems, and I suspect a single-file approach just
| isn't going to scale well. (Composition/inclusion is a bit of
| an MVP focus, I guess. I think it would also be nice to be able
| to have a good way to generate versions of the graphs from
| multiple perspectives--like 1. a diagnosis chart that helps
| users identify a common formulation of their problem and its
| most-canonical solution, 2. a graph that helps users figure out
| what a command-line tool is used for by mapping each one to the
| problems they solve, 3. a graph that helps users who've run
| into trouble solving X with Y by mapping it to more known
| solutions and showing additional context on the
| pros/cons/limits of each.)
|
| An aside: I noticed a TODO on your repo about supporting a
| comment syntax. Your existing syntax is very close to
| directives from reStructuredText (https://docutils.sourceforge.
| io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtex...). Since it's already a
| Python project, I wonder if it makes sense to piggy-back on
| docutils, or at least borrow the comment syntax (https://docuti
| ls.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtex...).
| siraben wrote:
| Graphviz's syntax easy enough to programmatically generate,
| here's the course dependencies for CS classes at my university,
| for instance, generated by a Haskell program that scraped the
| appropriate data.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/OZarGSg.png
| nikeee wrote:
| Shameless plug: I created an online Graphviz/dot editor which is
| powered by a language server that provides auto completion and
| refactorings. It uses a WASM version of Graphviz to render the
| graph. You can try it out here:
|
| https://edotor.net
| kstenerud wrote:
| Looks cool, but either the default graph has incorrect
| comments, or it's buggy on firefox. There were no lightbulbs,
| and clicking on "a" did nothing.
| sanjeetsuhag wrote:
| That's a fantastic tool! I've been doing some work to create
| some hierarchy diagrams and this is perfect.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I love how quickly you can generate a large GraphViz diagram! In
| a past job we had the "network drive of shame" (actually all 4 of
| my internships had that). So many Excel files which had
| dependencies which weren't documented at all.
|
| I once made a script which would go through each subdirectory,
| open every Excel file, and document all dependencies, and output
| to a GraphViz diagram. This enabled me to move a file and know
| which files would break, absolutely vital for making changes in
| that environment.
|
| It wasn't beautiful - VBA checking properties of tables, pivot
| tables, examining embedded VBA code searching for the network
| share URI - but it did work.
|
| For safety, I copied 200 GB from the network drive locally. 6
| months later the guy in IT was curious why imaging my replacement
| machine took _so_ long.
|
| --
|
| Last week I documented how money moves around my various bank
| accounts. I needed to make sure all the bills get paid even
| though I'm switching banks. A quick GraphViz diagram is proving
| to be really handy.
| asdkhadsj wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a resource for learning how to diagram?
|
| Notably, I don't want to free-design directional relationships
| that are counter intuitive to what people expect. Eg, if Service
| A calls Service B, does the arrow go to Service B? What about the
| response? I imagine there are a ton of little questions like this
| and I'd like to learn to write what people expect to see.
| mr_tristan wrote:
| I'd actually start with Tufte:
| https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
|
| There are standards like UML, but I've never found those to be
| as useful to start with. It's best to treat this as a "design
| problem": first, answer the question: "what am I
| communicating".
|
| Then, maybe look into conventions - but often you'll find less
| need for one "master UML diagram" and instead use many, smaller
| diagrams embedded within reference docs.
|
| I feel like project reactor did a good job here:
| https://projectreactor.io/docs/core/release/api/reactor/core...
|
| Personally I'd like to see more related to inheritance, but
| I'll take what I can get. The tooling can be a pain to embed
| automatic diagrams in
| mthoms wrote:
| Perhaps https://plantuml.com/sequence-diagram ?
| rakoo wrote:
| The Zim wiki software has a plugin for graphviz (https://www.zim-
| wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Diagram_Editor.html), where you can edit
| your graph and see the results in real time. Very helpful if only
| for this feature
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| Can't find a Windows binary to download.
| RBerenguel wrote:
| I used graphviz as the main visualisation for bear-note-graph
| [1], and it's super-easy to use programmmatically, and gives
| decent-looking results even for large graphs. It is also pretty
| customizable.
|
| I have a WIP version now using D3, and that one has been harder
| to manage (when the graph is too large you don't want to have it
| animate the layout on the fly). If you are curious, I used the
| same D3 code I have in the WIP to present a sitemap of my blog
| [2] [1] https://github.com/rberenguel/bear-
| note-graph [2] https://mostlymaths.net/sitemap/
| abathur wrote:
| Curious what you think about something, since it seems like
| you've been iterating on the challenge of a big interactive
| graph lately.
|
| I've been pondering building a big interactive chart, like a
| decision tree or differential diagnosis chart, that maps
| goals/needs/problems to docs/examples/tools (for the
| Nix/NixOS/Nixpkgs ecosystem, but the basic concept applies to
| any sprawling ecosystem where discovery is hard).
|
| I recently stumbled on https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid,
| which seems like it has an interaction model that could support
| what I have in mind (minus the question of whether there are
| performance cliffs that'd make it unsuitable).
|
| If you considered mermaid while working on bear-note-graph,
| could you share the conclusions you came to?
| RBerenguel wrote:
| I didn't check mermaid for bng, but had checked it before (I
| like visual representations of knowledge, no matter what they
| are for). Although I found it interesting, my gut feeling
| here was that if my problem's solution (at that point it was
| just out of curiosity) was going to be JS-based at some
| point, I should go directly for D3 (I already had experience,
| but not recent, with D3).
|
| Mermaid uses D3 under the scenes, so depending on your
| specifics it could be the best solution anyway, though.
| Performance wise, I'd expect it to be OK (D3 is pretty fast
| in most cases) although if there are any issues down the
| road, fixing them from such a high level library as mermaid
| could be daunting (it's "easier" to move down from D3 to
| paper.js or g.js or any other high performance canvas
| renderer if the case arises).
| braythwayt wrote:
| I ended up with a different tool, but I was uncomfortable using
| drawing apps for diagrams, and only rarely included them in my
| blog until I could use text to define them.
|
| I'm all-in on Markdown + Github for writing, so working with
| text-driven diagrams is a natural fit.
| prepend wrote:
| What tool did you use? I've been using mermaid and its markdown
| plug-ins and like it quite a bit, but am always looking for new
| ways.
| hugozap wrote:
| I recently wrote about using Markdown with Diagram codes
| https://blog.diagram.codes/posts/markdown-intro/ (I'm the
| creator) it's a complementary desktop tool with (web version
| is limited and free, desktop is paid)
|
| I love text based tools but wanted to create something that
| users without technical backgrounds can use, I feel that a
| lot of existing tools are too complex for casual users.
| rcarmo wrote:
| As much as I like Graphviz (and I've been using it for ages) I
| keep looking for an equivalent with two features:
|
| - Nicer, more modern looks (the original is too... LaTeX-y for my
| tastes)
|
| - A different layout engine that uses straight arrows and 90
| degree turns
|
| So far I haven't been able to find any good replacements,
| although a few JS libraries come reasonably close.
| [deleted]
| prepend wrote:
| I was thinking that a d3 implementation would help with this,
| except for the 90 degree, and found a project [0].
|
| It's not a force directed graph, but does seem to me to look
| better. And since the output is javascript it can be styled and
| formatted as you like it.
|
| [0] https://github.com/magjac/d3-graphviz
| leejoramo wrote:
| It has been over a decade since I did this regularly, but I
| would import my Graphviz files into the excellent OmniGraffle
| (macOS) to provide what ever styling I wanted, and use a
| variety of highly configurable layout engines. Almost certain
| that the "straight arrows and 90 degree turns" layout is in
| there.
|
| OmniGraffle is one of the best commercial software packages
| every developed. Well worth a look if you are on macOS
| ribasushi wrote:
| > A different layout engine that uses straight arrows and 90
| degree turns
|
| It's not a property of the engine but of the graph itself:
|
| http://www.graphviz.org/doc/info/attrs.html#d:splines
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/9055243
| [deleted]
| withinboredom wrote:
| I use mermaid when I need a graph in markdown along with the
| mermaid extension to render it inline.
| RobinL wrote:
| Possibly Elk? - there's a simple start notebook here:
| https://observablehq.com/@tmcw/elk and example of more complex
| output here: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/notebook-
| visualizer-e...
| hugozap wrote:
| I've been working on diagram.codes, it's not a replacement for
| Graphviz as my goal is to have a self contained tool that is
| friendly to non technical users (so flexibility is sacrificed
| for some diagrams), you may find it useful.
| [deleted]
| cm2187 wrote:
| Also I think graphviz is a great tool when you want to generate
| some diagrams quickly and don't care too much about the design.
| If you have a precise idea of how it should look, it is
| possible to force it to look that way but it becomes a lot of
| work (with a complex logic of clusters, ranks, groups, etc).
| afterburner wrote:
| My main complaint.
| enriquto wrote:
| > Nicer, more modern looks (the original is too... LaTeX-y for
| my tastes)
|
| Can you explain what do you mean by that, exactly? I think the
| looks of graphviz graphs are exceedingly beautiful and I cannot
| imagine a better looking way of drawing graphs (other than some
| minor technical issues with font kerning).
| bvrmn wrote:
| My top graphviz issues.
|
| * Automatic edge placement can lead to visually ambiguous
| results and it is very hard to tweak it.
|
| * Edge title placement engine is sort of naive and best
| solution is to not use edge titles at all.
|
| * Bogus text wrapping. Text can leak outside of the node box.
|
| * Default margins and padding lead to visual clutter.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I was about to summarize my pain points but you covered
| them all and expressed them better than I could. What I
| often find difficult is to reliably prevent overlap, I
| would subsume that under you last point about margins and
| paddings.
| ngneer wrote:
| I have used Graphviz successfully to communicate with other
| software engineers about non-trivial state machines in the
| program. Specifically, C# Stateless allows exporting DOT files.
| Does anyone know if graphing nested nodes has already been
| solved?
| stilisstuk wrote:
| Dokuwiki has a very usefull graphviz plugin.
| https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:graphviz
| roenxi wrote:
| Graphviz is almost deceptively bad. If I see a graph in a book; I
| expect it was made in TikZ.
|
| TikZ isn't fun, but at least it has the flexibility to get a
| great looking image at the end of the process. The theoretical
| simplicity advantages of Graphviz usually get worn down by the
| fact that the diagrams look bad. Use PowerPoint, and if code is
| needed bite the bullet and struggle through TikZ.
| _ZeD_ wrote:
| chime in just to add that I discovered grapviz using the
| venerable doxygen[0] tool and the availability of the calling
| graph
|
| [0] https://www.doxygen.nl/index.html
| lihaoyi wrote:
| I use Graphviz throughout my book https://www.handsonscala.com to
| render diagrams. I honestly think it looks pretty good:
|
| - Dependency graph between chapters in the book:
| https://www.handsonscala.com/chapter-1-hands-on-scala.html#s...
|
| - Tree-shaped `Vector` with structural sharing:
| https://www.handsonscala.com/chapter-4-scala-collections.htm...
|
| - Singly-linked `List` with shared tails:
| https://www.handsonscala.com/chapter-4-scala-collections.htm...
|
| - Collections class inheritance hierarchy:
| https://www.handsonscala.com/chapter-4-scala-collections.htm...
|
| The book's home page above also has a nice actor-message-passing
| diagram rendered with Graphviz (might need to scroll down a bit).
|
| My only preferred change to the default style is `node [shape=box
| width=0 height=0]`. Otherwise the nodes have tons of white space
| that makes the graph a lot more bulky than it really needs to be.
|
| The automated layout engine gives me exactly what I want 90% of
| the time, and the last 10% is usually isn't too hard to coax into
| looking good via `rank=same`s or `constraint=false` or similar.
| In particular, the examples above required zero coaxing: I just
| specified the graph structure, and that's the layout that popped
| out.
|
| I ended up doing a lot of prototyping in
| http://www.webgraphviz.com/ and before pasting the final DOT into
| my markdown file. IntelliJ has a Graphviz/DOT plugin, but it's
| not as seamless as using that web editor. The graphs definitely
| end up looking a lot more consistent than anything I could come
| up with dragging boxes around in microsoft office or google docs.
|
| The graphs don't look fancy and design-y, but they're simple and
| straightforward and get the point across clearly.
| kragen wrote:
| Those all look great! I'm jealous! I think the green arrows do
| look fancy and design-y.
|
| I've sometimes been able to get surprisingly flashy results
| with cluster subgraphs with background colors.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I'd like to write some scripts that can take some of my code and
| produce a graph of it.
|
| Things I'd like is for example to draw a GCP cloud build file, or
| something like that.
|
| What would be a good intermediate format for this? I'll read an
| xml or yaml file into a python list of dicts and then loop
| through it and write ... Graphviz? Mermaid? Tikz?
|
| What do you guys recommend?
| q3k wrote:
| Using graphviz for visualizing these things is fast and easy.
| print('digraph foo {') # adj_list contains tuples of
| (parent node name, child node name) for parent, child
| in adj_list: print(f'{parent} -> {child}')
| print('}')
|
| Redirect that to a file and view with `xdot`, done.
|
| I've done exactly this a few days ago to visualize the Linux
| build graph:
| https://q3k.org/u/73839114a0e5ee65002029892a069dd1b645a8f9f0...
| iso-8859-1 wrote:
| Used Viz.js (Graphviz compiled to JavaScript) for an animated
| B-Tree visualization, and it works great:
|
| http://ysangkok.github.io/js-clrs-btree/btree.html#{%22actio...
| kragen wrote:
| A couple of important tips that the article omits:
|
| 1. For manual editing, dot -Tx11 foo.dot displays the graph in a
| window _and updates it automatically whenever you save_. So you
| can have an editor window open and the dot window and see the
| results of every tweak. For automatically generated graphs, this
| provides you with a window that you can update by overwriting a
| file with a new graph description.
|
| 2. Although HTML nodes are more versatile, shape=record is much
| easier, and sufficient for a pretty wide range of diagrams.
|
| For doing quick stuff by hand if you don't have Graphviz
| installed, or if you're stuck on a Mac without X-Windows, there's
| https://graphviz.christine.website/. I like Graphviz a lot; as
| other people point out, TikZ is capable of a wider range of
| graphics, and also you can write programs to generate graphs in
| TikZ. But Graphviz is often enough.
|
| A really simple graph like
| https://graphviz.christine.website/#digraph%20G%20%7Ba-%3E%7...
| is sometimes good enough without further tweaking, but for,
| _e.g._ , the top diagram in
| https://github.com/kragen/dumpulse#dumpulse-an-embeddable-du...,
| you usually have to tweak stuff a bit.
| egwor wrote:
| I used xdot in Ubuntu earlier this week and it crashed my Gnome
| session. Beware!
| m000 wrote:
| 3. dot pairs nicely with m4 [1] and a Makefile. Without m4,
| it's a pain to apply a uniform style on groups of nodes.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)
| kragen wrote:
| You can put the group of nodes in a subgraph and apply the
| uniform style to the subgraph. In https://gitlab.com/kragen/b
| ubbleos/-/tree/master/yeso#callin... I did that for example
| as follows in
| https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/api-
| ty...: subgraph types {
| node [shape=square]; subgraph ints {
| node [label=int]; int bool fd
| u32in die stride; }
| long int s32 u8 u32 -> ypix ywin; ...
|
| Its expressivity is limited, since it depends on a
| hierarchical classification of your nodes and arcs that
| doesn't always eliminate all duplication, but it's usually
| enough to manually style the nodes the way I want without too
| much hassle. Because "types" and "ints" aren't "clusters",
| they don't affect the layout. (If you do want to use
| clusters, that can make this approach more difficult.)dnl
|
| I haven't ever been quite desperate enough to use m4 to
| generate Graphviz files, although clearly it is a good fit.
| My experiences with m4 are more in the nature of getting way
| too much rope to hang myself with and then having a terrible
| time debugging. I wrote an HTML-generating macro language in
| m4 in 1994 and have never stopped regretting it.dnl
|
| I do agree about the Makefile. In Dumpulse I used the
| following Makefile rule: %.png: %.dot
| dot -Tpng < $< > $@
|
| That way I can rebuild the README diagrams (if outdated) just
| by listing "diagram.png heartbeat.png health-report.png" as
| dependencies of the "all" target.
| https://github.com/kragen/dumpulse/blob/master/Makefile
| m000 wrote:
| You only need a couple of line to plug in automatic m4
| preprocessing in Makefile. And perhaps add a .SECONDARY
| line if you are debugging to prevent the intermediate .dot
| files from being deleted. %.dot: %.dot.m4
| m4 < $< > $@
|
| I use m4 to implement something akin to css classes, only a
| bit more powerful because you can do pseudo-subclassing.
| E.g. define(`base_node', `width=1.75,
| height=1.0, fontname="Menlo", fontsize=13')
| define(`file',`base_node, shape=note')
| define(`directory',`base_node, shape=folder')
| define(`important', `fontname="Menlo Italic"')
| ... tarball [file, label="foo.tar"];
| vardir [directory, label="/var"]; etcdir
| [directory, important, label="/etc"];
| kragen wrote:
| Right! That kind of crosscutting thing is tricky to do
| with the hierarchical nature of subgraphs. Without some
| kind of macro preprocessor you'd end up doing something
| like node [width=1.75, height=1.0,
| fontname="Menlo"]; subgraph files {
| node [shape=note]; tarball [label="foo.tar"];
| subgraph importantfiles { node
| [fontname="Menlo Italic"]; ...
| } } subgraph dirs { node
| [shape=folder]; vardir [label="/var"];
| subgraph importantdirs { node
| [fontname="Menlo Italic"]; etcdir
| [label="/etc"]; } }
|
| This obviously has the drawback that if you change the
| importance font, you have to change it twice instead of
| once, and you might forget. And clearly there are cases
| where that kind of duplication is a bigger problem than
| the difficulties with m4.
| [deleted]
| ColinWright wrote:
| I use GraphViz a lot. Here it the Twitter conversation that
| ensued when I asked a question about the use of Group Theory "In
| Real Life":
|
| https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chitter/GroupTheory_IRL.svg
| gilleain wrote:
| Ha nice visualisation. Would be amazing if this was available
| for more chat systems where conversations branch like this.
|
| Also, as a side note its funny that there is a lot of
| discussion (including Baez!) about theoretical maths, and one
| lone tweet about molecular symmetry.
| ColinWright wrote:
| I have the same system for Mastodon ... works well to help
| visualise the complex discussions that sometimes happen.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| haha, that is awesome. "show don't tell", "the medium is the
| message"... and wow, what a great use case! This tree UI for
| rendering multi-threaded conversations would be a great feature
| in slack or twitter. Bravo -- and thanks for sharing! :)
| Lunatic666 wrote:
| I'm using it at work, e.g. to visualize state machines. It
| makes it a lot easier to discuss it with business people. In
| Java there is a great library which translates code into
| graphviz markup: guru.nidi/graphviz-java
| h91wka wrote:
| I don't want to diminish importance of graphviz, but PlantUML
| is better suited for visualizing state machines, message
| sequence diagrams and whatnot.
| username3 wrote:
| Does PlantUML do statecharts?
| seidleroni wrote:
| Yes. https://plantuml.com/state-diagram
| xamde wrote:
| PlantUML is a good syntax. Under the hood... it renders via
| GraphViz
| baq wrote:
| which is exactly why it's great! :)
| bvrmn wrote:
| I've been trying to use graphviz for many years. Idea of storing
| graph data as text with presentation hints is very appealing. But
| simple diagrams can be made in corresponding software (draw.io)
| way too faster. For complex diagrams I had to constantly fight
| with layout engine and place too many hints.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| While the stylings on graphviz are somewhat limited, as others
| have indicated, I have yet to find a modern js based in browser
| library makes the layouts as aesthetically balanced right out of
| the box as much as graphiz/dot does.
| bregma wrote:
| Fun hidden use of graphviz: if you use GCC's <regex> in your
| code, try defining _GLIBCXX_DEBUG and call the member function
| _M_dot() on your regex objects.
|
| We left that in when developing the <regex> module because it
| turned out to be very useful for debugging regular expressions,
| not just the regex implementation itself.
| shpongled wrote:
| That's cool! Every time I end up implementing some kind of
| graph structure, writing a simple dot output method is one of
| the first things I do. It's incredibly useful for debugging
| stuff, and only takes a couple minutes to put together.
| edparcell wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Graphviz. My old team created a library called
| Loman, which we open-sourced, which uses DAGs to represent
| calculations. Each node represents a part of the calculation and
| contains a value, similar to a cell in an spreadsheet, and Loman
| tracks what is stale as you update inputs. Loman includes built
| in support for creating diagrams using Graphviz. In our quant
| research we have found that invaluable when revisiting old code,
| as it allows you to quickly see the structure and meaning of
| graphs with hundreds of nodes, containing thousands of lines of
| code.
|
| We've found it quite useful for quant research, and in production
| it works nicely because you can serialize entire computation
| graph which gives an easy way to diagnose what failed and why in
| hundreds of interdependent computations. It's also useful for
| real-time displays, where you can bind market and UI inputs to
| nodes and calculated nodes back to the UI - some things you want
| to recalculate frequently, whereas some are slow and need to
| happen infrequently in the background.
|
| [1] Github:
| https://github.com/janushendersonassetallocation/loman
|
| [2] Docs: https://loman.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
|
| [3] Examples:
| https://github.com/janushendersonassetallocation/loman/tree/...
| jcpst wrote:
| Graphviz has improved my development workflow.
|
| I use dot notation, and in spacemacs I can have a buffer with the
| the png file that reloads on save.
|
| When debugging distributed enterprise systems, being able to type
| in the workflow as you go and then share your findings is
| awesome.
| speeder wrote:
| I wasted in my current project too many time trying to make GViz
| behave. It is a tool that has lots of potential but has some
| insanely obvious flaws, I literally wasted 8 work days just
| trying to make a small planning document, because Graphviz won't
| cooperate unless you start to pile up attributes one after the
| other in Byzantine hacks.
|
| 1. Why the "cluster" word is needed on subgraph names? I am not
| making my project in English.
|
| 2. Why I can't move a whole subgraph to the "end" or "start" ?
| GViz attempts to make all graphs compact (regardless your
| settings) and thus tends to shove subgraphs in "random" places.
|
| 3. Why nodes sometimes leave their subgraph and end on another
| one? Even when the end result makes no sense? (My graph ended
| with several places where "a" and "c" is on one cluster and "b"
| is in a another, with lots of "U" shaped edges connecting then)
|
| The official website has a bunch of broken links.
|
| "Weight" attribute often is ignored...
|
| And the list goes on.
|
| Stack overflow is full of bizarre solutions to Graphviz behavior,
| for example minimum edge length (that for some reason is in
| inches despite most of the planet using mm)
| zengid wrote:
| I wonder if this could be used on windows via the Windows
| Subsystem for Linux?
| wmu wrote:
| Really nice, well written introduction. Graphviz is a cool tool,
| we used this when debugging some graph-related algorithms.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Has anyone seen a library to draw genealogy trees
| programatically? Every time I look at it, it looks like an
| impossible problem.
| op03 wrote:
| https://github.com/fredatgithub/FamilyShow
| zwischenzug wrote:
| Another plug: I wrote about using Graphviz for representing
| project management dependencies in code and collaborating with my
| team here:
|
| https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/12/18/project-management-as-co...
|
| The OP page is a really great intro, I could have used it as a
| reference when I was doing that work.
| hmottestad wrote:
| I love generating DOT from my Java programs. I recently
| implemented a query explainer that would output the query plan as
| DOT.
|
| Btw. For those working with DOT I've always found it great to be
| able to copy-paste it right onto a webpage and see the results.
| My current favourite tool:
| https://dreampuf.github.io/GraphvizOnline/
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