Visualizing Graphs mit Graphviz (and LaTeX) – Part I
- Visualizing Graphs mit Graphviz (and LaTeX) – Part I
- Visualizing Graphs mit Graphviz (and LaTeX) – Part II
This is the first article in a series to describe Graphviz, an amazing tool to generate org charts and relationship diagrams, and ways to work with it from LaTeX. (I need to compile a huge set of slides so my intention is to save some time by automating the process)
I knew of its existence for quite a while but never managed to take anough time to get a closer look. Driven by my job however (the setup of a Private Equity fund of funds involves different legal entities) I decided to give it a try.
Graphviz was developed at the famous AT&T labs and released under Eclipse Public License. It consists of a set of binary tools that are able tranform Graphviz’s description language DOT into graphics.
Until further notice I will use dot
, one of the binaries, to transform the examples into PNG. There are other converters like neato
, which differ from dot
in the way they calculate the distances between the nodes, etc.
Working with Graphviz involves defining nodes and edges between them. See the following, non-minimal example. I use a digraph
(other types like e.g. graph are available but I didn’t look up the differences so far), define two nodes a and b and and edge between them.
digraph G{ a [label="Node A"]; b [label="Node B"]; a->b[label=" An edge"]; }
Using the command dot -Tpng nameoffile.gv
I get the following PNG:
The above example is a bit more sophisticated than the minimal working example:
digraph G{ hello->world; }