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I very much agree and the only thing that I'm missing is tools that generate a somewhat stable output. What I want is tools that take their last output into con

I very much agree and the only thing that I'm missing is tools that generate a somewhat stable output. What I want is tools that take their last output into consideration and generate new diagrams that are both correct and as similar as possible to the last output they produced. They should do what a human does out of necessity when updating a diagram manually - make it represent the current state correctly with minimal effort. Of course that means the diagrams will not be optimal in any case. For example, there could be better arrangements of boxes or less crossings of lines. I sill think stable diagrams are important for our limited brain and one important reason why people shy away from automatic diagram generation is the mental chaos a complete rearrangement of elements brings with it. One example of a software that got this right is Taskjuggler, the obvious counterexample is Graphviz.

groestl 4y ago
> What I want is tools that take their last output into consideration and generate new diagrams that are both correct and as similar as possible to the last output they produced. Something I've been struggling with as well. Now it sounds like a task for ChatGPT and dot, need to try that today.
- graphviz 4y ago
  If you're not too fussy about results it might not be "that hard" to load a previous layout into dot, and optionally mark the nodes and edges that are allowed to be moved (or preferred not to be moved), and run the algorithms on that. It "just" needs someone to work on it, or pay for developers to do it. We wrote a paper about this in the mid 90s and Gordon Woodhull even got a successor of that to work, see dynagaph.org
graphviz 4y ago
The graph drawing community extensively studied algorithms that update and "preserve the user's mental map" of various types of layouts. It's all heuristics anyway; sometimes they produce locally optimal layouts, but it's not as if extant layout systems are producing mathematically optimal layouts in general.

groestl 4y ago

> What I want is tools that take their last output into consideration and generate new diagrams that are both correct and as similar as possible to the last output they produced. Something I've been struggling with as well. Now it sounds like a task for ChatGPT and dot, need to try that today.

graphviz 4y ago
If you're not too fussy about results it might not be "that hard" to load a previous layout into dot, and optionally mark the nodes and edges that are allowed to be moved (or preferred not to be moved), and run the algorithms on that. It "just" needs someone to work on it, or pay for developers to do it. We wrote a paper about this in the mid 90s and Gordon Woodhull even got a successor of that to work, see dynagaph.org

graphviz 4y ago

The graph drawing community extensively studied algorithms that update and "preserve the user's mental map" of various types of layouts. It's all heuristics anyway; sometimes they produce locally optimal layouts, but it's not as if extant layout systems are producing mathematically optimal layouts in general.