Graphviz

Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. It reads graph descriptions written in the DOT language and produces diagrams as images or documents.

You describe nodes, edges and their attributes in a text file. Graphviz layout programs then place the items and render the result. Output can be SVG for web pages, PDF or PostScript for documents, or an interactive view in a graph browser. Colors, fonts, tabular node layouts and hyperlinks can all be set in the source text.

• Layouts for nodes and edges from DOT text
• Output to SVG, PDF and PostScript
• Colors, fonts and custom node shapes
• Hyperlinks inside diagrams
• Clusters and tabular node layouts

Graphviz suits engineers, researchers and analysts who need to draw graphs such as dependency trees, networks and state machines. It is a good fit for people who prefer to script their diagrams rather than draw them by hand, and for projects where diagrams are generated by other programs.

Graphviz is open source and free to download. It runs as a command line toolkit installed on your machine, and the documentation is included with the release. The DOT language is simple to start with, but layouts for large graphs often need some tuning of attributes before they look clear.