▲ 2 points

Ask HN: Alternatives for gvpr

by anderspitman·10y ago·2 comments·view on hn ↗

I've found Graphviz gvpr to be very useful for programmatically generating graph visualizations. For example if I'm creating a visualization for a graph algorithm, and want to show each step of the algorithm as an iteration of the graph mutated from the previous state, gvpr makes it pretty easy to. This makes it very nice to make changes earlier in the algorithm (such as visual style) and have them propagated through all the steps. However, the language is ancient and it's easy to imagine a lot of additional features in a tool like this. Are there any alternatives in this space?

I spent some time playing around with NetworkX (python library) today. It has all the necessary features for graph building, and the graphviz (dot) file writing seems to have enough features to accomplish what I was looking for. The small proof of concept script I put together seemed on par with what I could do with gvpr.

Igraph is a great general purpose library for manipulating graphs, with interfaces in both R and Python.