I'm looking for either algorithms or visualization tool for (nice) circuit/block-diagram drawing.
I am also interested in a general formulation of the problem.
By "circuit drawing", I mean the capability of exploring place & route for block-diagrams (rectangles) with I/O ports and their connections (wires). These block-diagrams can be hierarchical i.e some blocks may have some nested internal sub-structure etc.
This topic is strongly related to classical graph-drawing, with the supplemental constraint of the need to take ports location into account, and possibly the shape of the blocks (rectangle of various sizes). Graphviz tools do not respond to the problem (at least my previous experiments have not been satisfactory).
Force-directed algorithms retain my attention, but I have just found papers on classical directed graphs.
Any hints ?
[update nov 21 2013] it seems that the best reference to date is Spönemann
To make production quality circuit diagrams as well as block diagrams, I strongly recommend J. D. Aplevich's "circuit macros". It's well documented and actively maintained. See the examples produced by this package circuit macros examples
There is some learning curve, for example to be able to use the "dpic" graphing language to draw your own diagram. But the tool itself is very powerful.
For me there are two remaining issues:
no live update
svg output is lacking
I hacked up some Javascript to
(watch m4 file change)->[m4->dpic->latex->pdf]->svg->(show in html)
Here is the gist of it
// watch .m4 file
var chokidar = require('chokidar');
var resolve = require('path').resolve;
const touch = require('touch')
const {exec} = require('child_process')
chokidar.watch("*.m4").on('change', fn=>{
let ff = resolve(fn)
console.log(ff, "changed")
exec("runtask.bat " + ff, {cwd:"../"}, (err,stdin,stdout)=>{
console.log(err,stdin, stdout)
touch("index.html") //svg updated
})
})
Here is the runtask.bat for Windows
m4 pgf.m4 %1 | dpic -g > tmp.tex
C:\texlive\2017\bin\win32\pdflatex template.tex
tool\dist-64bits\pdf2svg template.pdf %~dpn1.svg
tool\dist-64bits\pdf2svg template.pdf %~dp1tmp.svg
That way, you can "draw" by writing m4/dpic code and see the result in the browser live; and svg is generated from pdf which looks a lot nicer.
I am also using TikZ at the moment but you may wish to try http://blockdiag.com/
Here is one:
http://www.physicsbox.com/indexsolveelec2en.html
Here is where to look for others:
http://www.freebyte.com/electronics/
www.educypedia.be/electronics/easoftsim.htm
There are alternatives to graphviz that may do the job - see e.g. infovis, protovis, tulip.
See also other related questions 1, 2, 3.
Can you explain where graphviz falls short? The only requirement you list that I'm not sure about is attaching to specific ports. I would have thought you might be able to solve that with composite shapes / subgraphs, but maybe not...?
EDIT: Another option, particularly if you're looking at software engineering diagrams. Have you considered the eclipse gmp toolkit? It's what's used to build e.g. the UML2 editor tools.
hth.
I don't know of any tool that is a clear winner for easily making nice block diagrams with a minimum of manual labor. Some of the best looking results I've seen have been from TikZ. Check out the examples here:
http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/area/electrical-engineering/
I have been getting very good results from Draw.io. It is a webapp but has a pretty powerful diagram editor and some decent stock symbol libraries. Drawings can be exported as PNG or SVG so can be publication quality and they link up to
Related
I am trying to build a graphql schema visualizer using something other than viz.js (the library is too large and adds 1MB to the bundle). I was recommended webcola and it seems to be a very powerful library.
I have gotten to a point where the necessary elements are being rendered and linked correctly. My next step is to get the layout right. I would like to do something similar to graphql-voyager (uses viz.js).
Here is a codesandbox of what I have so far:
graphql-diagram
EDIT: My question is, how could I lay out what I have similarly to graphql-voyager? I would like help setting the right constraints and applying whichever algorithm necessary to position the nodes and routing the edges accordingly.
GraphQL Voyager author here :)
Before switching to viz.js we tried lots of other possible solutions for almost a month. Here is the article about our journey: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-we-got-1-500-github-stars-by-mixing-time-tested-technology-with-a-fresh-ui-b310551cba22
TL;DR; Graph drawing is rocket-science
Moreover, since Voyager release (2 years ago), we evaluated even more libraries with the exact same result.
As a side project, we are working on the Graphviz fork aggressively shrunk to just meet Voyager requirements. Our end goal is to rewrite the required parts in pure JS and embed it directly into Voyager.
ATM it's in early PoC stage and we are not ready to release it yet.
I am currently using Neo4j Python rest client and I would like to visualise the graph and be able to amend it, add new nodes relationships etc. Also I would like the changes in the neo4j database as well. Is that possible? Also can self-loops be visualised? I have read about D3.js and Neoclipse and Gephi in http://www.neo4j.org/develop/visualize but I am not sure which one to use.
Thanks in advance.
You can manipulate the graph in Neo4J using Cypher, in particular using a the REST API.
Any kind of tool that allows you to interface with Cypher is potentially able to do what you are asking: it is a matter to combine some Cypher queries with the GUI.
Said that, create the right visualization for what you are doing might be tricky and general approach might no satisfy your needs: while Neoclipse can let you manipulate nodes and links in Neo4J (for free) you might want to do in a particular way (for example restricting the choice of editing or the field/properties to be changed).
Linkurious offers a solution to do that as well, but it's a commercial license.
Other solutions such KeyLines, d3.js, sigmaJS let you personalize that experience: note that they will require to create the interface yourself, but the result will be much better in case of a specific product IMHO.
So value your time and requirements and go with the proper solution.
For more tools have a look at the Neo4J visualization page: http://www.neo4j.org/develop/visualize
About self loops:
that's a tricky bit and there is not a right way to do those - imagine a scenario with hunders of multi-selfloops.
Personally I would recommend to NOT draw them on the chart as link/edges, while representing them in some other ways: es. glyphs, notes, bubbles on the node...
I believe the only tool that allows this today is Neoclipse, but I don't think it's updated to use the Labels and Indexing features released in 2.0.
As such, your best bet will be using the Neo4j Browser to visualize and Cypher to mutate your graph. If you want richer functionality and want a fun project to hack on, it shouldn't be super hard to build a basic visualization for Neo that allows mutating the graph. I would have a look at sigma.js: http://linkurio.us/sigma-js-1-0-next-gen-graph-drawing-lib-web/
Any one knows a tool to find difference between 2 notebooks at the source level?
The compare notebooks tool in workbench 2 seems to work at the internal data structure level which is not useful for me. I am looking for tool that looks at differences at the source level (what one sees when looking at a notebook, i.e. not the FullForm).
I am using V8 of Mathematica on windows.
EDIT1:
How I display the output/report from NotebookDiff in a more readable form?
This answer is based on discussion in the comments to other parts of this question.
It also could (and should) be automated if it's going to be used with any regularity.
This could be done by tagging the cells you want compared and using NotebookFind to find the cells for extraction and comparison.
A solution for comparing just a single large cell of code (as sometimes occurs when makeing demonstrations) is to copy the code in InputForm from both notebooks
and paste it into a simple diff tool such as Quick Diff Online
which will then display the standard diff for you:
The above code was taken from one of Nasser's demonstrations.
Another option is to use CellDiff from the AuthorTools package.
Needs["AuthorTools`"];
CellDiff[Cell["Some text.", "Text"],
Cell["Some different text.", "Text"]]
To use on your demonstrations you can copy the cell expressions from the two versions by right clicking on the cell brackets:
There is an undocumented package in the built-in add-ons (in $InstallationDirectory/AddOns/Applications) called AuthorTools. Once loaded, it exposes a NotebookDiff function which provides some basic diff features:
Needs["AuthorTools`"];
nb1 = NotebookPut[
Notebook[{Cell["Subsection heading", "Subsection"],
Cell["Some text.", "Text"]}]];
nb2 = NotebookPut[
Notebook[{Cell["Edited Subsection heading", "Subsection"],
Cell["Some different text.", "Text"]}]];
NotebookPut#NotebookDiff[nb1, nb2]
As this package is undocumented, please realize it is potentially buggy and is not considered a supported feature, but hopefully you still find it useful.
Note that you can also get handles to notebooks with e.g.:
nb1 = NotebookOpen["path/to/a/notebook.nb"]
and a list of notebooks currently open in the front end
Notebooks[]
If you must work with notebooks then NotebookDiff in AuthorTools is probably your best bet. If this is an important part of your workflow (due to version control or some other constraint) and you have some flexibility you may want to consider moving the code from the existing notebook (.nb) into a package file (.m), which will be saved as plain text. You can still open and edit package files in the Mathematica notebook front end, but you get the added benefit of being able to diff them using existing text diffing tools.
I would like to represent data that gives an overview but allows them to drill down in an inline fashion - so if you had a grouping of say 6 objects the user could expand the data and it would show the 6 objects immeadiately below it before any more high level data.
It would appear that MSHFlexgrid gives this ability but I can't find any information about actually using it, or what it's limitations are (can you have differing number of fields and/or can they have different spacing, what about column headers, indentation at for the start, etc).
I found this site, but the images are broken (in ie8 and ff3.5). Google searches show people just using the flat data representation but nothing using the hierarchical properties). Does anyone know any good tutorials or forums with a good discussion about pitfalls?
Due to lack of information about using it, I am thinking of coding my own version but if anyone has done work in this area I haven't found it - I would of thought it would be a natural wish for data representation. If someone has coded a version of this (any language) then I wouldn't mind reading about it - maybe my idea of how to do it wouldn't be the best way.
You might want to check out vbAccelerator. He has a Multi-Column Treeview control that sounds like what you may be looking for. He gives you the source and has some pretty decent samples.
The MSHFlexGrid reference pages and the "using the MSHFlexGrid" topic in the Visual Basic manual?
Sorry if you've already looked at these!
For example, right now I have a roll-my-own solution that uses data files that include blocks like:
PlayerCharacter Fighter
Hitpoints 25
Strength 10
StartPosition (0, 0, 0)
Art
Model BigBuffGuy
Footprint LargeFootprint
end
InventoryItem Sword
InventoryItem Shield
InventoryItem HealthPotion
end
human editable (w/ minimal junk characters, ideally)
resilient to errors (fewest 'wow i can't parse anything useful anymore' style errors, and thus i've lost all of the data in the rest of the file) - but still able to identify and report them, of course. My example the only complete failure case is missing 'end's.
nested structure style data
array/list style data
customizable foundation types
fast
Are there any well known solutions that meet/exceed these requirements?
Yaml is a good solution and very close to what you have. Search for it.
I second the YAML suggestion. It's extremely easy to edit, very forgiving of mistakes and widely supported (especially among the dynamic languages).
I'd say the most common choices are:
JSON (offical site) - very flexible, though the punctuation can take a bit for people to get used to
INI - super simple to use, but a bit limited in data-types
XML - pretty flexible, common, but way too verbose sometimes
You could try JSON available at: http://www.json.org/
It was designed for javascript and web usage initially. But it's pretty clean, and supported in many languages.
Lua was designed to be a programming language where the syntax lets you easily use it as a markup language as well, so that you include data files as if they were code. Many computer games use it for their scripting, such as World of Warcraft due to its speed and ease of use. However it's originally designed and maintained for the energy industry so there's a serious background.
Scheme with its S-expressions is also a very nice but different-looking syntax for data. Finally, you've got XML that has the benefit of the most entry-level developers knowing it. You can also roll your own well-defined and efficient parser with a nice development suite such as ANTLR.
I would suggest JSON.
Just as readable/editable as YAML
If you happen to use for Web then can be eval()'ed into JavaScript objects
Probably as cross language as YAML