Ever wished you had a graph for something but didn’t want to put in the effort to draw it by hand using Dia? (If you’ve ever used Visio, that’s what Dia is like… but it’s free)
Graphviz (my new favorite toy) lets you draw graphs just by telling the computer what the connections are. It’ll do the visual stuff itself. Don’t believe me? Take a look at an example (Click the graph to see the text that graphviz took as input)
Oh, and don’t think it’s limited to directed graphs either. Take a look at the example gallery. (Just keep in mind that the more confusing input texts were automatically generated by some other program)
Last but not least, graphviz can be used to automatically generate clickable image maps. I’m not sure whether I’ll use that feature yet, but I’m definitely planning to integrate it into several of my programs to provide a more intuitive representation for certain types of data.
Cool Stuff – Graphviz by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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