Subject: graphviz: Text on self-edges of a node is poorly placed
Package: graphviz
Version: 2.26.3-5
Severity: normal
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I'm making a digraph showing state-transitions for the terrain in
freeciv; a simple dot file has done very nicely for the transitions
between states; irrigation (blue arcs) turns forest into plains, mining
converts back, etc. When I try to add arcs indicating 'internal' state
transitions - irrigating hills doesn't change the fact that they're
hills but does improve their food output - I run up against a limitation
on the placement of text on such self-arrows.
By default, all the self-arrows come out on the right; when there are
several on a node, each self-edge's loop goes round the last one's label
and nodes are moved apart enough to make room for these edges and
labels. This is all readable but aesthetically messy; it would look
nicer if self-edges protruded in different directions so as not to push
one another further from the node to which they relate. I can set the
headport and tailport to move the edges around, but it turns out that
the placement of their text labels is then messed up.
If I put an edge :nw->:nw or :sw->:sw, its text gets placed exactly as
if the edge were :w->:w (and in a position sensible for this port but
not for nw or sw). So I can only put one label (hence one edge) on the
left. Fortunately (!) this is asymmetric: :se->:se and :ne->:ne are
placed differently than one another and :e->:e (the default).
Sadly, however, even then I see a more severe problem, also present for
the left-side self-loops: node, edge and label positions are not
adjusted to make space for the labels of non-default-port self-loops.
While I may be able to concoct some abomination of a way to stretch
labelangle and labeldistance to work round this, the default clearly
does take account of label texts when placing the rest of the graph and
its labels, so it's a shame that setting an edge's ports breaks that.
Example small dot file showing all symptoms described above:
digraph BugExample {
/* Trivial graph: */
"Left" -> "Bottom" [label="Down Right"];
"Right" -> "Bottom" [label="Down Left"];
/* Two left self-edge labels collide: */
"Left":nw -> "Left":nw [label="North-West"];
"Left":sw -> "Left":sw [label="South-West"];
/* Self-edge labels collide with normal edge label ("Down Right"): */
"Left":se -> "Left":se [label="South-East"];
"Bottom":ne -> "Bottom":ne [label="North-East"];
/* Labels over-lap one another and nodes */
"Right":w -> "Right":w [label="West"];
/* Skip this last to see "West" overlap "Left" instead of "East": */
"Left":e -> "Left":e [label="East"];
}
Note that the graph-drawing *does* take account of the self-edges, it's
only the labels that are left out of consideration; and the :e->:e
edge's label, unlike all others, *is* correctly provided for (delete its
line to see Left and Right move closer together, causing West to overlap
Left instead of East), even when its ports are specified explicitly as
:e (where the default isn't actually representable by specifying port;
it's sort of :ene->ese; remove the :e specifiers to see the edge loop
open up a bit without the nodes or labels moving).
Some of the problems are alleviated if I use different ports for head
and tail; but, even then, some label texts overlap other label texts.
I normally emit the image as SVG using
/usr/bin/dot -Tsvg
(automated by a .htaccess hack and a cgi-bin script in my local
web-server) but see exactly the same result when running dot -Tpng
manually. (For my reference:
http://vortex/~eddy/img/misc/graphviz-label-placement-bug.dot
is my local copy.)
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.1
APT prefers oldstable
APT policy: (500, 'oldstable'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.ISO-8859-15, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.ISO-8859-15
(charmap=ISO-8859-15)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Versions of packages graphviz depends on:
ii libc6 2.11.2-10 Embedded GNU C Library:
Shared lib
ii libcdt4 2.26.3-5 rich set of graph drawing tools -
ii libcgraph5 2.26.3-5 rich set of graph drawing tools -
ii libexpat1 2.0.1-7 XML parsing C library -
runtime li
ii libgd2-xpm 2.0.36~rc1~dfsg-5 GD Graphics Library version 2
ii libgraph4 2.26.3-5 rich set of graph drawing tools -
ii libgvc5 2.26.3-5 rich set of graph drawing tools -
ii libgvpr1 2.26.3-5 rich set of graph drawing tools -
ii libx11-6 2:1.3.3-4 X11 client-side library
ii libxaw7 2:1.0.7-1 X11 Athena Widget library
ii libxmu6 2:1.0.5-2 X11 miscellaneous utility library
ii libxt6 1:1.0.7-1 X11 toolkit intrinsics library
Versions of packages graphviz recommends:
ii ttf-liberation 1.05.2.20091019-4squeeze1 Fonts with the same
metrics as Tim
Versions of packages graphviz suggests:
ii graphviz-do 2.26.3-5 additional documentation
for graph
ii gsfonts 1:8.11+urwcyr1.0.7~pre44-4.2 Fonts for the Ghostscript
interpre
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