3 ms·

I've used this tool a bit, it's the good kind of voodoo, but it desperately needs modernization, it looks like it was forged in the '90s and was never updated.

donatj 9y ago
What would you change? To me it feels nearly perfect and feature complete.
- Zhyl 9y ago
  At the moment most popular interpreters will generate graphs that look... old. It might be the serif font, it might be the slightly clunky label placement. It could even be the black outline, no fill of the default. Of course, you can change the defaults, but creating the 'look' you want textually without an interactive creator is non-trivial. Given that the main strength of graphviz is that I can write it in a stream of consciousness (like markdown), or generate it automatically using some kind of script from another data source, this is somewhat of a blocker in its usefulness. And, of course, the customisation syntax is fairly clunky and not easily readable. I don't think I've seen a DSL that does colouring well in this regard, but graphviz goes a step further by not being consistent with CSS or other markups. It is good in terms of feature-completeness, but as mentioned in the TC, there are areas where it could be polished up a bit to make it feel more modern.
  - bitexploder 9y ago
    I agree styling isn't exactly easy, but I have built very nice mplex diagrams I'm a fraction of the time I could have done it in a tool like Visio. Compared to endlessly thrashing about in a GUI it is still a dream. I think because it is just polish no one has really had the desire to do a significant update.
    - achamayou 9y ago
      There are a bunch of prettifiers for the SVG output, I couldn't find the one I used last time, but stumbled across this one that seems very neat and even makes the graph interactive: https://github.com/mountainstorm/jquery.graphviz.svg/ https://github.com/mountainstorm/jquery.graphviz.svg/ Edit: found it https://github.com/vidarh/diagram-tools/tree/master https://github.com/vidarh/diagram-tools/tree/master
Zhyl 9y ago
Yeah, just the edges sanded off really - more of a markdown. The YAML to graphviz's JSON. And then the graphics need to look more D3 than UML.

donatj 9y ago

What would you change? To me it feels nearly perfect and feature complete.

Zhyl 9y ago
At the moment most popular interpreters will generate graphs that look... old. It might be the serif font, it might be the slightly clunky label placement. It could even be the black outline, no fill of the default. Of course, you can change the defaults, but creating the 'look' you want textually without an interactive creator is non-trivial. Given that the main strength of graphviz is that I can write it in a stream of consciousness (like markdown), or generate it automatically using some kind of script from another data source, this is somewhat of a blocker in its usefulness. And, of course, the customisation syntax is fairly clunky and not easily readable. I don't think I've seen a DSL that does colouring well in this regard, but graphviz goes a step further by not being consistent with CSS or other markups. It is good in terms of feature-completeness, but as mentioned in the TC, there are areas where it could be polished up a bit to make it feel more modern.
- bitexploder 9y ago
  I agree styling isn't exactly easy, but I have built very nice mplex diagrams I'm a fraction of the time I could have done it in a tool like Visio. Compared to endlessly thrashing about in a GUI it is still a dream. I think because it is just polish no one has really had the desire to do a significant update.
  - achamayou 9y ago
    There are a bunch of prettifiers for the SVG output, I couldn't find the one I used last time, but stumbled across this one that seems very neat and even makes the graph interactive: https://github.com/mountainstorm/jquery.graphviz.svg/ https://github.com/mountainstorm/jquery.graphviz.svg/ Edit: found it https://github.com/vidarh/diagram-tools/tree/master https://github.com/vidarh/diagram-tools/tree/master

Zhyl 9y ago

Yeah, just the edges sanded off really - more of a markdown. The YAML to graphviz's JSON. And then the graphics need to look more D3 than UML.