On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 11:03 AM, Martin Bähr <mbaehr@email.archlab.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:

Excerpts from Peter Uhnák's message of 2016-02-24 10:35:05 +0100:
> In any case, I wrote a simpler layout delegator in Roassal that delegates
> the layouting to graphviz and it works reasonably well, so I could probably
> add it to Roassal (you however need graphviz installed and it would add
> another dependency to Roassal, which I'm not so keen on).

how does that work? does it ask graphviz for the position of the nodes and then
recreate that in roassal?

Yes, I generate .dot file that describes the nodes I want the layout for (that includes the dimensions of it), and then the .dot file is passed to GraphViz… from there I parse the generated SVG file (they can also output other formats like txt, or xml) and move the Roassal nodes.

> Maybe also OGDF (http://ogdf.net/doku.php) could be used if you are ok with
> GPL… they have their own graph format so there could be some interaction.

this would work the same as with graphviz as an additional dependency on ogdf, right?

GraphViz is good enough for generic graphs, but OGDF is well-founded and much more powerful layouting library. However C++ coding is required if one wants to use it.

Peter