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Yes, TikZ can position the vertices itself. E.g. http://www.tcs.uni-luebeck.de/downloads/papers/2011/2011-con... http://www.tcs.uni-luebeck.de/downloads/mitarbeiter/tantau/2... https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/203692/how-to-automa...

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That's great! Did these people really implement graph drawing algorithms as latex macros, or does it call an external program? I'm afraid to look it myself, lest I discover the truth.

Some of it is LaTeX, but the more intensive algorithms are done with embedded Lua, using LuaLaTeX. There is no external program.

Wow, that was a long time ago, very fun project to work on. But yeah, without deep knowledge of the TeX side you'd likely still struggle a bit to understand how the two sides interact, at least it was a bit of a struggle for me, maybe / hopefully it got a bit better in the meantime.

And thankfully LuaLaTex was ready enough at that time, I can't imagine how bad it would've been to do this in pure Tex ...

Are you one of the authors of tikz graphdrawing?

Just a former student who participated in the first version (let's say draft) of it, which had no really interesting algorithms in it yet, just the overall graph framework and integration with the rest of PGF/TikZ.

Really cool project though, one of the few that made it outside of uni.

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