[Monotone-devel] Re: Drawing graphs (was Re: Ancestry Graph)

[Bruce Stephens]

Bruce Stephens <address@hidden> writes:

> This isn't monotone specific, so please feel free to stop reading
> whenever you want.
>
> I've started looking at the possibility of producing a simple graph
> plotting library to replace dot in monotone-viz.  So I downloaded
> TSE93.pdf from
> <http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/TSE93.pdf>, which
> allegedly describes dot's algorithm.

Now I've read the paper a few times (and I almost understand some
parts of it), it strikes me that this describes a family of
algorithms, and for the kinds of interactive applications that are
most interesting to me, the optimality that network simplex provides
probably isn't necessary---probably I can hack some kind of iterative
process to produce something that's acceptable, even if not as good as
what dot (or vcg) might produce.  (It's probably worth doing that
anyway, to understand better the problems involved.)

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