Note: This is not a tutorial; to understand this you should know how to use the basic features of the tools and languages involved. Please see the user guides for further information.
See Graph Attributes. There is also information on command-line usage and output formats.
Q. Where can I discuss graphviz?
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Q. I'm trying to make a dot layout larger. How?
Magnification isn't directly supported. We admit this should be fixed. For now you have to adjust individual parameters fontsize, nodesep and ranksep. For example
digraph G {
graph [fontsize=24];
edge [fontsize=24];
node [fontsize=24];
ranksep = 1.5;
nodesep = .25;
edge [style="setlinewidth(3)"];
a -> b -> c;
}
If you do this, make sure you are not fighting a conflicting graph
size setting, like size="6,6".
If you're using Postscript, you can just scale up the output by manually adding a command such as 2 2 scale where the Postscript environment is set up. Make sure to adjust the BoundingBox too if your tools look at this header.
Q. I'm trying to make a neato layout larger. How?
See above regarding font sizes.
You can generally push nodes further apart by changing elen (edge lengths). For example, to make it three times the default:
graph G {
edge [len=3]
a -- { b c d }
}
Q. How can I join or merge certain edge routes?
You can try running dot -Gconcentrate=true or you can introduce your own virtual nodes drawn as tiny circles where you want to split or join edges:
digraph G {
yourvirtualnode [shape=circle,width=.01,height=.01,label=""];
a -> yourvirtualnode [arrowhead=none]
yourvirtualnode -> {b;c}
}
This only works in graphviz version 1.7 and higher. To make edges between clusters, first set the graph attribute compound=true. Then, you can specify a cluster by name as a logical head or tail to an edge. This will cause the edge joining the two nodes to be clipped to the exterior of the box around the given cluster.
For example,
digraph G {
compound=true;
nodesep=1.0;
subgraph cluster_A {
a -> b;
a -> c;
}
subgraph cluster_B {
d -> e;
f -> e;
}
a -> e [ ltail=cluster_A,
lhead=cluster_B ];
}
has an edge going from cluster_A to
cluster_B. If, instead, you say
a -> e [ltail=cluster_A];
this gives you an edge from cluster_A to node
e. Or you could just specify
an lhead attribute.
The program warns if a cluster specified as a
logical node is not defined.
Also, if a cluster is specified as a logical
head for an edge, the real
head must be contained in the cluster, and
the real tail must not be.
A similar check is done for logical tails. In
these cases, the edge
is drawn between the real nodes as usual.
Q. Clusters are hard to see.
Set bgcolor=grey (or some other color) in the cluster.
It's not us! It's probably your printer setup. If you don't believe this, run dot -Tps and looks for the BoundingBox header. The coords are in 1/72ths of an inch.
Q. How do I create special symbols and accents in labels?
The following solution only works with the
raster drivers that load Truetype or Type1
fonts! (That means, -Tgif, -Tpng, -Tjpeg, and possibly
-Tbmp or -Txbm if enabled).
Use UTF8 coding, e.g.
You can look up other examples in this handy character set reference .
Q. How do I get font and color changes in record labels or other labels?
There's no easy way right now. We're working on it. Sigh.
Q. In plain format, arrowheads are missing. It's a bug that may have solidified into a feature by now. A workaround is to set
edge [dir=none]
Q. When I have a red edge it shows up as a solid red in PNG and GIF formats, but has a black border when rendered to JPEG.
This is an artifact of JPEG's lossy compression algorithm. JPEG isn't very good for line drawings. PNG is bitmap format of choice. John Ellson wants to deprecate and eventually remove the JPEG driver, but North is reluctant to change anything that people might already rely on.
Q. How can I get custom shapes in my graph?
Please see the Shape HowTo for some approaches. There is no easy way to create custom shapes that work with dot/neato, dotty (Unix or MS-Windows) and Grappa (the Java front end), because they don't share any universal back end structure. We're thinking about it.
Q. How can I get some display feature (such as bold lines) in dotty?
In some cases, you can use Grappa or webdot for display instead of dotty. For example, Grappa has generalized polygons (node [shape=polygon]) that dotty lacks.
If the display attribute that you need isn't there already, in dotty, there's probably no easy way to do it except by rolling up your sleeves and hacking the dotty code (a lefty script) that interprets and renders graphical attributes. This is problematic for the same reason as above: there's no universal low-level driver layer shared across all the graphviz tools. Sorry, we already feel bad about it.
Q. How can I get rid of the little circles on edges ("edge handles") in dotty?
Edit the file dotty.lefty and change the line that says: 'edgehandles' = 1; to 'edgehandles' = 0; it's around line 110.
Q. I already have all the coordinates for the nodes and edges of my graph and just want to use dot, neato, or dotty to render it. How?
Put the graph with layout attributes into a dot file. Then run neato -s -n2. For example:
neato -s -n2 -Tgif file.dot -o file.gifNote that if an edge does not have a pos attribute defined, neato will perform whatever edge routing it would normally do.
Q. I already have all the coordinates for the nodes, and I want dot or neato to route the edges.
It's not really too convenient to use dot for this. It is possible to use neato for this, running neato -s -n For example:
neato -s -n -Tgif file.dot -o file.gifneato will use the node positions, but use its technique for routing the edges. There are several things to note. First, the neato edge router is different from dot's. Without the built-in top-down bias, it doesn't do as good a job of avoiding edge overlaps and, at present, it doesn't handle multi-edges at all. Second, by default, neato uses straight lines as edges. To get spline routing, you have to specify -Gsplines=true. And this will only work if none of the nodes overlap. Since the input graph supplies fixed node positions, it is the user's task to insure this.
Q. I already have all the coordinates for the nodes and edges of my graph and just want to use dotty to render it. How?
Just run dotty on it. Dotty will use the given pos attributes.
Q. How can I make client-side image maps?
Find a tool somewhere (like this one) to convert server maps to client maps. Client side maps must also be merged into the rest of the HTML document somehow.
Q. Why aren't my server-side maps being recognized? I've checked the HTML!
Make sure that your server has map files enabled. For example, if running apache, check that httpd.conf has a line like the following:
AddHandler imap-file mapand that it is not commented out!
neato -Goverlap=false neato -Goverlap=scaleIn the first instance, neato will use a Voronoi diagram-based technique to remove overlaps. In the second, it scales up node positions, but not node shapes, until there are no overlaps. The first technique uses less space; the second preserves symmetries.
Q. How can I avoid node-edge overlaps in neato?
neato -Goverlap=false/scale -Gsplines=true -Gsep=.1The sep argument is the node-edge separation as a ratio of a node's bounding box. (Don't ask why this isn't just a constant!) Note that this option really slows down neato, so should be used sparingly and only with modest-sized graphs.
Q. Neato runs forever on a certain example.
It could be that your graph is too big, or it could be that neato is cycling. Run neato -v to observe its progress. Neato uses an anti-cycling heuristic, so cycling shouldn't occur. If your graph is small and the -v output indicates cycling, please submit the graph as a bug report, so we can consider additional heuristics. In addition, there are ways to defeat the cycling by causing neato to use different initial conditions:
neato -Gstart=3or to stop earlier:neato -Gepsilon=.01 neato -Gmaxiter=500If it's a large example, the problem is that neato (which is nearly the same algorithm as multidimensional scaling) is at least quadratic in time complexity. The spline router is even worse: O(N^3). So don't run neato -Gsplines=true unless you're willing to pay for it.
Q. Dot runs forever on a certain example.
Try dot -v to observe its progress.
Note that it's possible to make graphs whose layout or even parsing is quadratic in the input size. For example, in dot,
digraph G { a -> b -> c -> .... -> x -> y -> z a -> z b -> z c -> z /* and so on... */ x -> z }The total edge length (therefore the layout time) of this as a ranked graph is quadratic in the number of nodes. You probably won't encounter the following, but it is also possible to construct graphs whose parsing takes quadratic time, by appending attributes to nodes and edges after the graph has been loaded. For example:digraph G { /* really big graph goes here... */ n0 -> n1 -> ... -> n999999999; n0 [attr0="whatever"] n0 [attr1="something else"] /* and so on with many more attributes */ }The addition of attr0 touches every node of the graph. Then the addition of attr1 touches every node again, and so on.Q. Neato has unnecessary edge crossings, or does something bad.
Neato and all similar virtual physical model algorithms rely on heuristic solutions of optimization problems. The better the solution, the longer it takes to find. Unfortunately, it is also possible for these heuristics to get stuck in local minima. Also, it is heavily influenced by the initial position of the nodes. It is quite possible that if you run neato again, but with a different random seed value, or more iterations, you'll get a better layout. For example:
neato -Gstart=5 file.dot -Tps -o file.ps neato -Gepsilon=.0000001 file.dot -Tps -o file.ps