Mastering Layout Engines in Graphviz: Dot vs. Neato vs. Twopi vs. Circo
47 points by vismit2000 3 days ago | 9 comments
  • brians 13 hours ago |
    If you don't even explain neato vs fdp, what's the point?
    • compiler-guy 11 hours ago |
      It's a sales website with a not-terrible hook.

      Also AI generated diagrams with strange labelling doesn't persuade me much.

  • aezart 11 hours ago |
    I occasionally use graphviz and pretty much always wind up frustrated with it. The syntax is pedantic and the resulting output is pretty ugly for all but the simplest graphs.
    • recursivecaveat 10 hours ago |
      What's your use case for it? For manual diagrams, making an explanatory diagram for a presentation or something I would never recommend it. Declaratively typing out all your information is going to take just as long as setting it directly in drawio, but with less control over the result.

      Where graphviz/dot has always shined for me is you have some application built around a data flow graph and occasionally need to debug a run with 50+ nodes at a time. So you write a file dumper for your structure. A visual makes understanding the structure so much faster, and nothing else seems to produce layouts nearly as good as dot.

  • tamimio 10 hours ago |
    I tried most of these declarative diagrams, while they work to some degree, the best outcome I had was with drawio but you should have the skill installed.
    • VorpalWay 10 hours ago |
      Depends on your use case. If i want to export some graph data structure from a program to visualise it for debugging purposes, graphviz is way more relevant than doing it by hand in drawio.

      But if I'm making a presentation for a conference I would choose differently. And in between you get a whole spectrum of tradeoffs.

  • AceJohnny2 8 hours ago |
    Tangentially, I must highlight the underrecognized gvpr [1], the Graphviz Pattern Scanning and Processing Language and part of any Graphviz installation. In short, it is an AWK-like program to process your .dot files.

    Combined with the fact that the DOT syntax allows for gradual precision, in that you can add directives to an existing DOT document to add details (shape, positioning...), and you can do pre-processing of a graph before passing it to the final layout and rendering engine.

    (In fact, you could probably implement all of the linked layout engines in gvpr)

    I used this at some point to generate a Factorio processing graph, organizing each layer by its minimum production depth (ie ores at layer 1, plates at layer 2, etc...)

    [1] https://graphviz.org/docs/cli/gvpr/

  • meh2frdf 8 hours ago |
    I’ve been working in this area recently, none of the layout engine are very good, they essentially apply the same algorithm to all the things when really a graph is often a collection of different patterns and what makes sense is often semantics driven. So yes built my own, the use case is representing cloud and enterprise architectures. Have a decent layout engine now, and created a declarative dsl for the agent to interact with, but the agent sucks, feels like we need to hand roll a lot of features/skills
  • yhwirkhwh 15 minutes ago |
    Thhhw