Dot

Dot is part of the Graphviz group of programs.

It is similar in some ways to LaTeX, in that you start with a text document written with a particular syntax, and then run it through dot to process it and generate images (pdf, png, jpeg, etc) as the output.

Installation

Dot can be downloaded from here: http://graphviz.org/Download.php

Binaries for most platforms are provided, as well as source code.

Usage

Use the example dot file given below. This should be put in a file like plot.dot or something similar:

digraph G {
CFD
"Governing equations"
CFD -> "Governing equations"
"Discretization of governing equations"
CFD -> "Discretization of governing equations" 
CFD -> "Fluid mechanics"
 Turbulence
 "Fluid mechanics" -> Turbulence
  Turbulence -> "Turbulence modeling"
   "Turbulence modeling" -> RANS
   LES
   "Turbulence modeling" -> LES
   "Turbulence modeling" -> DNS
 }

This file is written in "dot" syntax. Next, this file will be processed through dot. Two things must be specified: first, the format of the output image, and second, the output file.

Use the following command:

dot plot.dot -Tpng -o plot.png

Alternatively, you can specify:

dot plot.dot -Tpng -O

which will use the name of the input file and change the extension to match the format (in this case, plot.png).

Dot supports the following output formats:

• png
• gif
• ps
• svg
• svgz
• fig

and some less common formats:

• cmapx
• imap
• mif
• hpgl
• pcl

See http://www.graphviz.org/cvs/doc/info/output.html for more info.

References

• Dot command line usage: http://www.graphviz.org/doc/info/command.html

• Graphviz documentation: http://graphviz.org/Documentation.php

• Dot user's manual: http://graphviz.org/pdf/dotguide.pdf

• Directed versus undirected: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13236975/graphviz-dot-mix-directed-and-undirected
  • Summary: for undirected graphs use graph G {. For directed graphs use digraph G {.