Help:Graphviz

Graphviz is a graph visualization markup language. Given a list of nodes and connectivities, it can automatically lay out a graph diagram.

Software homepage

http://www.graphviz.org/

wiki extension from wickle.com

possibly better version of this extension from case.edu

Software availability

available for unix, windows, mac

can be installed as a mediawiki extension on request

Other related software

ghostscript, xfig

command to type to run

dot circo neato twopi unflatten fdp

various algorithms for automatic layout and conversion to other formats

dotty lneato

editor / viewer

acyclic tred gvcolor gvpr nop prune sccmap

various filters

View online documentation

software home pages above

man -M /opt/csw/graphviz2/man command

Drawing graphs with dot (PDF)

Location of example files

websites above, especially the gallery.

Examples

Graphviz diagrams can be embedded directly in the wiki like this:

 <graphviz>
 digraph G {
 rankdir=LR
 hello -> world;
 }
 </graphviz>

<graphviz> digraph G { rankdir=LR hello -> world; } </graphviz>

 <graphviz>
 digraph G {
  1->c; 2->c; 3->c; 4->c; 5->c;
 }
 </graphviz>

<graphviz> digraph G {

1->c; 2->c; 3->c; 4->c; 5->c;

} </graphviz>

See also the gallery linked above.

Additional notes

Graphviz is available within the wiki by enclosing the program text in the <graphviz> tag. Only the dot layout algorithm is available in the wiki at this time.

From the command line, you can also use the circo and neato alternate layout algorithms, and errors in your diagram will be shown. The wickle version of the wiki graphviz extension only supports dot.

Graphviz can output in several formats including images and postscript. The man page for dot gives details.

Graphs can be automatically generated from other data sources using tools like perl to extract and reformat the data, and then graphviz tools to lay out the drawing. (This can be automated with the make command.)