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An Introduction to GraphViz

Sep 10, 2004  By Mihalis Tsoukalos
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How to use command-line tools and basic GraphViz utilities to produce graphs both simple and complex.
Conclusion

Using dot, twopi and NEATO to create graphics is not difficult. The three utilities were made according to the UNIX philosophy: they are easy to use, they do one thing well and the only requirement for using them is a simple text editor.

Graphical tools that make use of dot, twopi and NEATO languages for making graphs exist as well, but I still prefer the command line. The presented tools can be used for simple graphs as well as for complex graphs.

I would like to thank Nikos Platis for proofreading the article.

Resources

GraphViz Development Web Site

Official GraphViz Web Site

"Methods for Visual Understanding of Hierarchical System Structures". Sugiyama, K., Tagawa, S. and Toda, M. Man and Cybernetics. IEEE Trans. Systems, February 1981.

A Technique for Drawing Directed Graphs. Gansner, E. R., Koutsofios, E., North, S. C. and Vo, K. IEEE Trans. Software Engineering, May 1993.

"An algorithm for drawing general undirected graphs". Kamada, T. and Kawai, S. Information Processing Letters, April 1989.

The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms. Aho, Hopcroft and Ullman. Addison Wesley, 1974.

Mihalis Tsoukalos lives in Greece with his wife, Eugenia, and works as a high school teacher. Previously, he worked as a UNIX systems administrator, an Oracle DBA, a UNIX programmer and a PL/SQL programmer. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and a M.Sc. in Information Technology from University College, London. Mihalis can be reached at mtsouk@freemail.gr.

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Re: An Introduction to GraphViz

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 09/12/2004 - 02:00.

Readers might be wondering why dia doesn't include dot, or KDE, or...

And the answer's the license, which is kind of open source, but not quite. OSI don't seem to regard it as so, anyway, and it's in nonfree in Debian.

However, for those many cases where the license doesn't matter so long as you can get the tool, graphviz is a great set of tools to have around.

Re: An Introduction to GraphViz

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 09/09/2004 - 02:00.

Any reason you didn't mention Leon Brocard's excellent GraphViz Perl module, which makes this so much easier?

http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/GraphViz-2.00/

To say nothing of the other GraphViz related modules on CPAN.

Re: An Introduction to GraphViz

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 09/09/2004 - 02:00.

Great article!
I wrote a web log analyzer that outputs a graphviz
graph from the web server logs (www.hping.org/visitors)
and I think I can modify the program to produce a better
output thanks to this article.

Btw a note about the graphviz's license: it's not opensource
if I remember correctly (or at least not an OSI approved
license).

Graphviz (AT&T source code) license

Stephen North's picture
Submitted by Stephen North (not verified) on Tue, 11/09/2004 - 22:24.

Thank you for the nice articles about Graphviz.

We're aware of the problems about the AT&T Source
Code License, and expect to have some good news shortly.

Stephen

Graphviz is now under the CPL

Stephen North's picture
Submitted by Stephen North (not verified) on Fri, 06/03/2005 - 08:27.

We hope this will be beneficial to the open source community.
Please visit www.graphviz.org for downloads and other info.

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