Graphviz drawing - make a box that starts at one node and goes to the end of another one - graphviz

Question

I have a timeline and would like a box to be drawn next to a particular number of years
digraph timeline {
node [fontsize=24, shape = plaintext];
1940 -> 1950;
1950 -> 1955;
1955 -> 1960;
node [fontsize=20, shape = box];
{ rank=same; 1940 test; }
}
This places a timeline on the left hand side going from 1940 to 1950 and so forth. I would like draw a box next to the numbers that starts at 1940 - which is what I do now with { rank=same; 1940 test; } and that ends with 1955.
Here is an example of the box drawn at 1940
Here is an example of the box drawn at 1955 with code { rank=same; 1955 test; }
I would like to have the box drawn from the start of 1940 position to the end of 1955 position, so encompassing these two boxes right now.

Answer 1

Tricky solution is to draw a cluster and place invisible nodes inside it using style=invis. Then align the cluster with the timeline using newrank.
Script:
digraph timeline {
newrank=true;
node [fontsize=24, shape = plaintext];
1940 -> 1950 -> 1955 -> 1960;
subgraph cluster_1 {
test [fontsize=20]
cl_start [shape=none style=invis]
cl_end [shape=none style=invis]
cl_start -> test -> cl_end [style=invis]
}
{rank=same;1940;cl_start}
{rank=same;1955;cl_end}
}
Result:

Answer 2

No easy way to do this with Graphviz.
dot does not allow nodes to span ranks. It centers all nodes in the same rank on the same line (horizontal, with rankdir=TB).
if you set rankdir=LR, you can get nodes to span years, but positioning & node sizing become difficult
you could put a node on every year you want the final node to span and the post-process the result to overwrite the several nodes with a single large node.
you can us the neato -n (https://graphviz.org/faq/#FaqDotWithNodeCoords) capability and position & size all the nodes yourself
or you could try another language entirely (maybe pikchr https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/homepage.md)