Interactive constraint-based system for drawing graphs

Abstract

The GLIDE system is an interactive constraint-based editor for drawing small- and medium-sized graphs (50 nodes or fewer) that organizes the interaction in a more collaborative manner than in previous systems. Its distinguishing features are a vocabulary of specialized constraints for graph drawing, and a simple constraint-satisfaction mechanism that allows the user to manipulate the drawing while the constraints are active. These features result in a graph-drawing editor that is superior in many ways to those based on more general and powerful constraint-satisfaction methods.