What is the best technology for drawing trees and graphs?

flutillie picture flutillie · Dec 1, 2012 · Viewed 22k times · Source

What is the easiest, clearest way to draw graphs and trees for CS theory assignments?

I am not happy with any of these solutions:

  • text-based: ugly
  • tikz latex package: cumbersome for larger trees
  • Adobe Illustrator: time-consuming

Has anyone written software specifically for this task?

Thanks!

Answer

user1869069 picture user1869069 · Dec 1, 2012

1.) http://www.graphviz.org/ is the easiest for drawing directed and undirected graphs. You just provide a list of nodes, edges and labels in the proper syntax, and GraphViz will spit out an image.There are various front-end programs that provide a nicer interface to generate the GraphViz code.

2.) http://www.sagemath.org/ (it's open source and can draw weighted directed graphs)

3.) http://sourceforge.net/projects/treeform/

4.) http://www.mi.sanu.ac.rs/newgraph/

5.) http://www.conceptdraw.com/products/drawing-tool/

6.) http://rw4.cs.uni-sb.de/~sander/html/gstools.html (collection of graph drawing tools details)