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Ask HN: Something with more layout control than Graphviz?

4 points by anderspitman ↗ HN
I'm looking for something like Graphviz but with the following features:

1. Entire graph (including layout) can be represented in a human-readable textual format

2. Sane auto-layout, but once it's generated you can drag vertices to new positions and have the changes propagated back to the textual representation

3. Procedural generation features. Something like gvpr, but much nicer. Inheritance, etc.

The vision is to be able to quickly (at least as fast as you could draw it on paper) create custom graphs, but have complete control over tweaking what you created, both in a GUI and via text/programming. I've used Graphviz/gvpr and LaTeX/tikz the most. Both were very painful and lacked many desired features for this use case. I get the feeling I might be asking for too much, particularly when it comes to having a textual representation with the features I want that's still simple enough for a human to grok.

3 comments

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MurrayHill1980
You are asking for too much, but you could join our project and help. The inference of "intuitive" geometric constraints from operations in a graphical interface is an interesting problem. Realtime interactive edge routing is interesting, too. Have you looked at Tom Sawyer Software?
anderspitman
Would the constraints really have to be all that intuitive? I imagine it basically being simple line and shape primitives. For example if I drag a vertex to a new location, all that would need to change in the textual representation is the position of the vertex and and edges pointing to or away from it. Obviously these would be floating point values, which isn't ideal readability wise, but should be workable. d3 sort of works like this: you can drag nodes around and the changes are reflected in the DOM. I just want something more human readable than HTML/XML. Never heard of Tom Sawyer Software. Is that your employer?
MurrayHill1980
No, but I have respect for their work. I'm in the graphviz project. You might take a look at Tim Dwyer's WebCola, http://marvl.infotech.monash.edu/webcola/ which is not quite what you want, but seems closer and may be a plugin replacement for D3 force layout.