GraphvizAnim 0.2-alpha

A tool to create animated graph visualizations, based on graphviz

# GraphvizAnim

[](https://travis-ci.org/mapio/GraphvizAnim) [](https://gitter.im/mapio/GraphvizAnim?utm_source=badge&utm_medium=badge&utm_campaign=pr-badge) [](http://mybinder.org/repo/mapio/GraphvizAnim/examples/heapsort.ipynb)

GraphvizAnim is a tool to create simple animated graph visualizations; it is just a proof of concept, aimed mainly at teaching purposes. It is based on [Graphviz](http://www.graphviz.org/) for the graph rendering part and on [ImageMagick](http://www.imagemagick.org/) for the animated gif generation. You can [run the heap sort animation](http://mybinder.org/repo/mapio/GraphvizAnim/examples/heapsort.ipynb) on-line using [binder](http://mybinder.org/).

<p align=”center”> <img src=”examples/dfv.gif”/> <img src=”examples/heapsort.gif”/> </p>

A graph animation is just a sequence of steps, a step is in turn one or more actions such as: add, hilight, label, unlabel or remove a node, and add, hilight, or remove an edge. Animations can be built by invoking suitable methods of a gvanim.Animation object (in a Python program), or by parsing a simple text file (that, in turn, can be generated by a program in any language).

The [examples](examples) folder contains few instances of such approaches. After installing the package with python setup.py install, or using

pip install https://github.com/mapio/GraphvizAnim/archive/0.2-alpha.zip

you can generate an animated depth first visit (in a 3-regular random graph of 6 nodes) by running

python examples/dfv.py

or you can generate the simple animation described in [simple.txt](examples/simple.txt) as

python -m gvanim examples/simple.txt simple

You can generate an [Erdős–Rényi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93R%C3%A9nyi_model) graph (with 10 nodes and edge probability 1/10) by running

cd examples gcc -o er er.c ./er | python -m gvanim er

Finally, you can obain an interactive visualization of the heap sort algorithm using [Jupyter](http://jupyter.org/) by running

cd examples jupyter notebook heapsort.ipynb

and running all the cells in order; or you can give a try to [binder](http://mybinder.org) and watch the above animation [actually running](http://mybinder.org/repo/mapio/GraphvizAnim/examples/heapsort.ipynb) on-line.