graphviz-overlay 0.1.1

Generate templated graphviz source files from structured data

Generate templated graphviz source files from structured data

Why

The Graphviz dot language offers a descriptive and flexible way to define graphs of various sorts. However, I think it also has some issues.

• Maintenance/small changes quickly becomes a hassle, especially when you want to produce similar looking graphs. I.e. highlighting certain elements, or selecting specific parts (it is possible to render just subgraphs, but for me that is not always what I want).

• The layout engine is not exactly what you would call intuitive and getting it to do your bidding takes time and effort to discover. Also, you need to pull (and remember those) weird tricks. Basically, it’s just boilerplate work.

• The defaults does not really produce pretty looking graphs, and customizing the design is often tedious work and for me often ends up involving a bunch of copy paste. For SVG output stylesheets are supported, however that doesn’t really work with common cooperation tools (such as slack and github)

So, to address these issues I decided to put together a tool to address all that (and more).

Usage

CLI

The graphviz-overlay executable reads from stdin and produces dot source:

cat examples/simple.json | graphviz-overlay

Version History

0.1.1:

• Add initial documentation and project description

0.1.0:

• graph, digraph and er commands.

• Support for --select, --highlight and --shade via paths.

• Support for ranks

• External stylesheet definition.

• Nodes, edges, and graphs can have classes.