An interactive system for drawing graphs

Abstract

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 such as Claris Draw or Microsoft’s Powerpoint 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 “macro” constraints 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.