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DOT You don't use all the dot functionality! The DOT Display flickers and is jerky Why do I have to install DOT Why did you choose to use DOT? What is the difference between DOT and Graphviz

DOT

The Mysterious AT&T Graphviz Program

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You don't use all the dot functionality!

Yes, that is correct, I don't. At the moment the only colour mappings which are done are to turn the nodes and links red when they are part of a path. This was because I could find no reliable way of mapping any colour on to the colours which DOT supports. DOT kept giving me "unknown colour" errors during my prototyping. I do try to maintain the shape (within limits) and also the line style of nodes and links. Also Since Compendium-TA does not support nested graphs etc. neither does the dot output. I plan to add more dot functionality in future versions. But I still think that Compendium-TA is one of the fastest ways of generating simple DOT graphs.

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The DOT Display flickers and is jerky

Ah. You are probably resizing the form or scrolling around with the autogenerate button pressed down. The dot display flickers and is jerky because the display is being regenerated all the time. Simply press the button so that it is no longer activated and the display should be fine.

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Why do I have to install DOT

You don't! But if you do then you get the ability to layout a graph really quickly using the dot layout algorithms. This is really helpful when you knock up a graph quickly and want to format it nicely for someone to see, or when a graph gets really complicated and you want hints on how to lay it out, just view it using DOT.

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Why did you choose to use DOT?

I used to use dot myself for knocking up graphs quickly but writing the dot files was a bit of a pain. And when I started to write Compendium-TA, I interfaced with DOT so that I could get a good layout very quickly - Compendium-TA was very crude then and didn't have all the graph manipulation functionality that it does now. But I still found it useful to have a quick way of generating the graphs that DOT makes. Also this means that Compendium-TA can act as an easy to use front end for generating basic dot files.

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