An Interactive System for Drawing Graphs

In spite of great advances in the automatic drawing of medium and large graphs, the tools available for drawing small graphs exquisitely (that is, with the aesthetics commonly found in professional publications and presentations) are still very primitive. Commercial tools, e.g., Claris Draw, provide minimal support for aesthetic graph layout. At the other extreme, research prototypes based on constraint methods are overly general for graph drawing. Our system improves on general constraint-based approaches to drawing and layout by supporting only a small set of m̈acroc̈onstraints that are specifically suited to graph drawing. These constraints are enforced by a generalized spring algorithm. The result is a usable and useful tool for drawing small graphs easily and nicely. Proceedings of the 1996 Graph Drawing Symposium This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright c ©Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc., 1996 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139