bond@sce.carleton.ca (Greg Bond) (04/23/91)
As promised, here is a summary of the responses I received concerning
pretty printers for directed graphs. In all, I was referred to two
tools: a graph editor tool called GRAPHED, and a DAG pretty printer
program called DAG. I have only had the opportunity to use GRAPHED
(public domain software available via FTP). DAG was recommended by a
number of respondents but I have not had the opportunity to use it yet
as I am awaiting its delivery (free software license for academic
institutions from AT&T). Authors of both tools were among the
respondents to my query so I will include pertinent extracts from
their responses.
*****GRAPHED:
GRAPHED appears to be a solid piece of software for graph layout and
experimentation purposes. The existing documentation explains the
editor very well but since it was written, support for graph layout
has been added without accompanying documentation. Unless one is
familiar with existing graph layout algorithms, choosing the right one
for the task can be confusing. Matters are further complicated by the
fact that some of the user-set parameters are in German. However,
after corresponding with the author, I was directed to use the
Sugiyama algorithm which addressed my needs nicely. The author also
tells me that the "termgraph" package, included with GRAPHED, supports
entry and layout of Petri Nets. The author is currently translating
the documentation for this package to English.
From Michael Himsolt (himsolt@trillian.fmi.uni-passau.de):
You might take look at GraphEd, a graph & graph grammar editor.
GraphEd has several graph layout algorithms builtin, especially
for trees, DAG's and planar graphs (and some more will follow
this year). GraphEd runs on SunView, PostScript output is
available.
Graphed is available via anonymous ftp from
forwiss.uni-passau.de (132.231.1.10) :
/pub/local/graphed/graphed2.04.tar.Z
Manuals in Macintosh/MSWord4.0 format are in the same directory
(you will need StuffIt 1.5.1 to unpack them). I can also send you
printed versions of the manuals.
*****DAG:
As I mentioned, I have not had the opportunity to use DAG, however a
number of respondents highly recommended it.
From Stephen North (north@ulysses.att.com):
We (Emden Gansner, Phong Vo, and myself) wrote a Unix
program for this named 'dag'. It is described in the
Nov 1988 issue of Software Practice and Experience.
It is not public domain, but AT&T has been granting
licenses for binary copies to Universities, free of
charge. If you would like to pursue this, please
send me the name and address of a contact person
for your site.
--
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Greg Bond -----> bond@sce.carleton.ca (613) 788 5743
Dept. of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University
Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 5B6