Dot language - mesh layout instead of left to right or top to bottom?

Question

I'm still learning a bit about dot and graphviz and have been looking around for some examples for trying to do what I'm looking to do. I have a small example of a digraph that I created that represents some hosts on a network. At some point, I end up with so many nodes that I either have to scroll all the way to the right (with the top to bottom layout) or all the way down (with the left to right layout).

Is there any way in dot to have everything sort of look like a big circle/mesh as opposed to left to right or top to bottom? Here's an example:

digraph routes {
     "192.168.4.91" -> "192.168.12.46";
     "192.168.4.97" -> "192.168.12.46";
     "192.168.4.98" -> "192.168.12.46";
     "192.168.4.100" -> "192.168.12.46";
     "192.168.4.101" -> "192.168.12.46";
     "192.168.4.125" -> "192.168.12.46";
     "192.168.4.135" -> "192.168.12.46";
     "192.168.4.136" -> "192.168.12.46";
     "192.168.4.159" -> "192.168.12.46";
     "192.168.4.168" -> "192.168.12.46";
     "172.17.106.45" -> "192.168.12.248";
     "192.168.12.247" -> "192.168.12.248";
     "172.16.36.33" -> "192.168.12.248";
     "10.12.117.120" -> "10.12.117.121";
     "172.17.106.45" -> "10.12.51.102";
     "10.12.51.106" -> "10.12.51.102";
     "10.12.51.103" -> "10.12.51.102";
     "10.12.51.105" -> "10.12.51.102";
     "10.12.51.104" -> "10.12.51.102";
     "172.18.20.13" -> "10.12.51.102";}

It's not extremely bad given the small example, but when there's a lot more systems connecting to 192.168.12.46 for example, it becomes a pretty big mess. I know there's Visio for network diagrams and such, but I'm just whipping up a script that'll leverage this from Linux, so I'd like to keep it in dot (if possible) to automate a few things.

Not sure if there's a way to "bump" this on stackoverflow or not but I'm guessing at this point this isn't possible. — LewlSauce, May 27 '16 at 19:40

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 30 '18 at 13:26

Use the other programs from the Graphviz package (neato, fdp, circo, twopi), neato for example may produce some better results here. Check the manpage/documentation for additional parameters that affect node distance etc (see How to manage distance between nodes in graphviz? ).

Dot language - mesh layout instead of left to right or top to bottom?

1 Answers1