William Stein wrote: > 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? >
Personally, I like having the vertex labels for the graphs that I usually look at. However, my labels are usually not like the labels in the above sheet; usually mine are just the integers 0..n-1. However, I wouldn't be opposed to having the defaults that you listed above (but not red edges--something darker), and just having vertex_labels=True do something like with big labels. -- Jason Grout --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
