Hi, I was talking with two UW students (Kevin and Kazuo) who are brainstorming ways to improving plotting in graphs for Sage. One of the first things we tried was plotting a random graph (with a few components) in Mathematica. It looked massively better than Sage... but not because of the layout algorithm. The difference is that by default Mathematica makes the vertices tiny, the edges light (not black) and doesn't label the vertices. The Mathematica defaults are much, much different than the Sage defaults... and look much more professional. I was shocked to find that with a few similar changes to the defaults with Sage, the Sage-rendered graphs looked just as good as Mathematica's (whereas they look bad by default): Here's an example worksheet:
http://uw.sagenb.org/home/pub/5/ We're thinking of *changing* the defaults for plotting graphs G in Sage as follows: 1. Add an option to G called mode, so sage: G.plot(mode="classical") # everything (vertex labels, etc., look as they do now) sage: G.plot(mode="talk") # same as G.plot(talk=True) sage: G.plot(mode="default") # something new that looks much better, with vertex labels off sage: G.plot(mode="graphviz") # compute a layout using graphviz ??? 2. G.plot(talk=True) would be deprecated, but left in for a year. NOTES: * I think talk=True was a bad choice of option name. It's limiting, potentially conflicts with other options, etc. * instead of mode="classical", maybe it should be mode="networkx"? Isn't the current look of graphs mostly due to the defaults in NetworkX long ago? Is anybody (e.g., Jason Grout, Robert Miller) deeply opposed to this plan? Do you really think big bold huge labels being shown by default is actually a good idea? -- William -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
