Dear Lazyfedi, can anyone recommend a software tool for hand-directed graph layout?

[redmp@recurse.social]

@simontatham pretty sure there's a way to run graphiz that just adds the vertex location information to the dot file, and you can modify those by hand, and then generate the image.. I don't remember how.. try -Tdot maybe? https://graphviz.org/docs/outputs/canon/

[claus@hachyderm.io]

@simontatham how complex of a graph, and is the interactive portion a hard requirement? I'm slightly biased towards TiKZ, as it lets me define nodes, edges, and their attributes declaratively. It's not exactly interactive, but if you have a decent LaTeX editor then at least you can see the result of your graph declaration quickly, and I find that it minimizes the amount of tinkering I need to do while constructing charts. There are also markdown-targeted libraries like Mermaid that claim to do the same. I don't particularly like them, but I'd be negligent if I didn't at least mention them.

For truly interactive tools you're probably going to need to dip into commercial solutions. Visio is the classic offering for Microsoft systems. OSX's equivalent is OmniGraffle. And the online equivalent is Lucidchart.

[bhaktishh@types.pl]

@simontatham perhaps not exactly the answer to your question, but spytial[https://github.com/sidprasad/spytial] allows you to specify layout constraints that are dispatched to an smt solver and generates diagrams that obey those layout constraints. Probably a bit more work on your side as you’d have to specify what constraints you want, but it’s a pretty low effort tool for what it achieves. It also allows you to drag stuff around and restructures the diagram to ensure it maintains the constraints. I’ve personally not used it for anything but small examples and demos, but it looks promising!

[simontatham@hachyderm.io]

@claus TikZ is actually what I'm going to want to end up with, so any other output format will need to be translated into it in the end anyway! But I want to quickly try out a lot of layouts until I find one that's clear, before I hand-code a TikZ representation of it.

The kind of graph size I have in mind is something along these lines:
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/aperiodic-transducers/#p2-transducer
It won't be that exact graph, but it will be a couple of graphs of that general size and complexity.

In particular there will probably be a fundamental symmetry of the graph which I'll want the layout to reveal rather than obscuring. (That's true of this example too, but you can't see it at all in the tangle Graphviz made!)

[claus@hachyderm.io]

@simontatham I see. In that case the least effort approach would likely be Lucidchart. I did a quick check and they offer a 7 day trial, which might be enough to learn the ropes and play around with your diagram.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@simontatham there IS some amount of control that the user can exert on how things are placed and arcs are drawn (ranks etc). Depending on your specific needs this may or may not be sufficient

[oantolin@mathstodon.xyz]

@loopspace @simontatham Yeah, I think this is the easiest way: of you ask for output in dot or xdot format (using -Tdot or -Txdot on the command line), you get position information which you can then tweak.