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Comment by alejohausner | Hacker News Reader

The graphviz system [1], originally from at&t labs, has a program called "dot" that does this kind of thing very well, including routing the arrows around other boxes that may be in the way. It's been open sourced. It's also been ported to the web [2]

1: https://graphviz.org/

2: http://www.webgraphviz.com/?tab=map

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Sometimes I wish there were a more modern replacement for Graphviz. There are things that it doesn't handle very well (e.g., nested subgraphs) and I feel like there are good (albeit proprietary) algorithms which could make their way into a general package.

I use dot, and manually position everything, then use the neato -n2 option to render:

`dot -T ${format} -n${n} ${verbose>1?"-v ":""}-Goverlap-true -Gsplines=false -Kneato -o "${ output }" "${ input }"`

this still doesn't do subgraphs well,

so I sometime do the 'groups' in a separate document, then composite the layers with image magick

`magick composite ${verbose>1?"-verbose ":""}-gravity NorthWest "${a}" "${b}" "${png_output}"`;

Cool, I appreciate you sharing the info on your process!

You’re welcome

Not as easy to use, because it does not have a simple cli, but nested layouts are better than dot's with the Eclipse Layout Kernel. There is a JavaScript version, as well and you can try it in recent plantuml versions.

[0] https://www.eclipse.org/elk

[1] https://github.com/eclipse/elk

[2] https://plantuml.com/elk

Agree.

Also, this is a great problem, and we tried to solve it in a more general context. http://dpd.cs.princeton.edu/Papers/DGKN97.pdf

I believe it's an open problem what makes a curve look "natural" or how to do a good job of routing multiple splines around obstacles so they do not intersect each other, though the work of Keean Crane at CMU seems promising: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/RepulsiveCurves/ind...

This is a great github to play around with dot online: https://dreampuf.github.io/GraphvizOnline/

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