Re: metapsot vs. graphviz

[Gour <gour@mail.inet.hr>]

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>>>>> "Aditya" == Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu> writes:

Hello Aditya!


Aditya> Metapost is for drawing all kinds of graphics. It give you a
Aditya> very fine control on where to place objects, and is very well
Aditya> integrated with ConTeXt (your labels will be the same font as
Aditya> the rest of the document).  With the new mplib, using metapost
Aditya> in ConTeXt is very fast (for me I do not notice any difference;
Aditya> with mkii it used to take aboud 3-4 sec).

This is very nice feature...

Aditya> Graphviz is good for automatic positioning of nodes. If you have
Aditya> a large number of nodes, it can figure out the best way to place
Aditya> them. There are different versions, dot (for directed graphs),
Aditya> circo (for circular graphs), neato (for undirected graphs), fps
Aditya> (uses a different model for undirected graphs). For most of the
Aditya> cases, the output is average: the node placement is very good,
Aditya> but then it is difficult to get tex to process the labels, it is
Aditya> limited in terms of color effects that you can get. I find it
Aditya> very hard to modify the output.

I will probably not deal with many modes, but having support for all
kinds of graphics is preferred.

Aditya> Graphiz does give metapost output, but I found it to be a bit
Aditya> akward to use. The good part about graphiz is that is very easy
Aditya> to learn, and for most cases the output is acceptable.

But, as you wrote above, it is not a 'general' graphic package?

Aditya> There is dot2tex, which a python script that converts from dot
Aditya> (graphviz) to tikz. I have not tried it, but from the examples
Aditya> it appears to remove all the drawbacks of integrated graphviz
Aditya> with tex. It is tailored towards integration with latex, but it
Aditya> should not be too hard to configure it for context.

Thanks a lot for your input.

It seems that metapost is not the most easy way, but considering that
luatex & context are future, it looks worth to sit & have metafun ;)


Sincerely,
Gour


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Gour  | Zagreb, Croatia  | GPG key: C6E7162D
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