DOT (GraphViz)

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DOT is a simple but powerful description language for the visual representation of graphs . DOT can be used to describe the structure of a directed or undirected graph. DOT also has language elements to control the visualization of a graph. For example, the shape and color of the nodes and the edges can be specified.

DOT is interpreted, for example, by the renderers of the Graphviz software package. Depending on which renderer is used for a graph described with DOT, the result looks different. Each renderer implements a different basic principle for visualization. Graphviz provides five renderers: dot, neato, fdp, twopi and circo.

The statistical programming language R and the diagram R package can also be used to generate graphics that are written in the DOT language.

DOT was developed by AT&T and Bell Labs . DOT's vocabulary is relatively small. Syntactically, DOT is based on the C programming language .

example

the associated graph

The following example shows a directed graph with four nodes and three edges. The nodes and the edge relationships are shown within curly brackets. Directed edges between the nodes are shown by arrows ->. 

 digraph graphname
 {
     a -> b -> c;
     b -> d;
 }

Conversion to PNG

A DOT file can easily be converted to a PNG image. 

dot -Tpng input.dot > output.png

Rasterization

Binary tree from a DOT description, designed in Graphviz ( Huffman tree generator )

The following screening programs can render DOT:

Other file formats for graphs

  • GraphML - XML-based description language for the representation of graphs

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Richard Iannone et al.: R package diagramsR. Create Graph Diagrams and Flowcharts Using R. In: CRAN. The R Foundation, archived from the original ; accessed on July 19, 2016 (English, current version: 0.8.4).