4 ms·

Hah, that's hilarious. I also like graphs but hate manually laying them out, so I always use Graphviz and live with the results. Sometimes I think I could do

Hah, that's hilarious. I also like graphs but hate manually laying them out, so I always use Graphviz and live with the results. Sometimes I think I could do better, but typing "foo -> bar" a few times is so much easier than spending any time thinking about what would look nicest. One time I added colors though, that was kind of nice.

tejtm 5y ago
yep exactly. paraphrasing something I read somewhere ... "Best to think of Graphviz as a competent but unruly teenager" and then just be glad you did not have to do the work yourself.
- graphviz 5y ago
  Heh heh. It would probably be helpful to the community if we could add a layout plugin to allow users to specify layouts in some absolute or relative grid format, to avoid all the invisible edge and edge length hackery. We just need appropriate funding. We have some amazing maintainers who work on gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz now, but the think is, there are far more bug reporters than bug fixers. The first gen of Graphviz authors are timing out, so we very few people are around now to fix relatively deep semantic or logical bugs, c.f. https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ Best regards, Graphviz the Project
  - tejtm 5y ago
    Dearest Graphviz Project, In case you come back to revisit ... First I will note my comment appears nested one level deeper than I had been aiming for which may make it sound less positive than I intended. Second, Graphviz doesn't need to do anything to appease control freaks. You have been absolutely rocking it for decades. The important part of my glib description is 'competent' and to accept the very, very fair tradeoff between; already done with minimal effort and satisfying some fashion police insisting you do it their way when in reality they can't produce results themselves. The bottom line is, I can not thank you enough for releasing your software way back when I built it on my Amiga, you have been a constant companion in my career.
touisteur 5y ago
I wish it would output to graphml or something I could slightly edit with yEd or some manual tool. Does anybody have recipes for that? Or having generate some tikz simple layout and then moving on without dot? I can't say I have good memories of inkscape + dot svg output...

tejtm 5y ago

yep exactly. paraphrasing something I read somewhere ... "Best to think of Graphviz as a competent but unruly teenager" and then just be glad you did not have to do the work yourself.

graphviz 5y ago
Heh heh. It would probably be helpful to the community if we could add a layout plugin to allow users to specify layouts in some absolute or relative grid format, to avoid all the invisible edge and edge length hackery. We just need appropriate funding. We have some amazing maintainers who work on gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz now, but the think is, there are far more bug reporters than bug fixers. The first gen of Graphviz authors are timing out, so we very few people are around now to fix relatively deep semantic or logical bugs, c.f. https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ Best regards, Graphviz the Project
- tejtm 5y ago
  Dearest Graphviz Project, In case you come back to revisit ... First I will note my comment appears nested one level deeper than I had been aiming for which may make it sound less positive than I intended. Second, Graphviz doesn't need to do anything to appease control freaks. You have been absolutely rocking it for decades. The important part of my glib description is 'competent' and to accept the very, very fair tradeoff between; already done with minimal effort and satisfying some fashion police insisting you do it their way when in reality they can't produce results themselves. The bottom line is, I can not thank you enough for releasing your software way back when I built it on my Amiga, you have been a constant companion in my career.

touisteur 5y ago

I wish it would output to graphml or something I could slightly edit with yEd or some manual tool. Does anybody have recipes for that? Or having generate some tikz simple layout and then moving on without dot? I can't say I have good memories of inkscape + dot svg output...