Tag: graphviz

I had a frustrating bug the other day with a new XHGUI install, I am working on creating a VM for my new PHP tools course I am teaching in March and I wanted to pre-install and part-install a bunch of things so that I can show some great tools in a limited amount of time. My XHGUI wasn't quite right though; it couldn't generate the callgraph for me. Instead, it said:

Recently I've been drawing a few different kinds of diagrams for a book I was writing, and been using graphviz to create them. Since I struggled a bit to get them going the way that I wanted them to, I am sharing them here (as much for my future self as anyone else visiting, but if they help you too then that's excellent).

This year I moved my whole presentations toolchain over to LaTeX and PDF, and where I added diagrams (which doesn't happen a lot!) I used graphviz to generate them. Graphviz is a way of describing items and their relationships in a textual manner, and rendering them into a graph - and the results can be saved as an image, or included in LaTeX documents.

I found graphviz frustrating at times but on the whole it draws clean, symmetrical graphs far beyond anything else I can manage, even if I do use a mouse or tablet. Since I'm not able to use a pointing device on a regular basis, and I'm marking up my presentations in text also, it turned out to be a really good fit. I thought I'd share how I got on with it and some of my own graphs - as much to remind me next time conference season comes around as anything.