ANNOUNCE graphviz_2_0a1 - Incremental Graph Layouts

[John Ellson]

This is the first publically available release of the
"Graph Visualization Toolkit version 2_0 alpha 1"

Graphviz provides facilities for the manipulation of graphs of nodes
and edges, and provides a variety of layout engines for the
visualization of graphs or subgraphs.

Graphviz_2_0 is a descendent of graphviz_1_x, but the graph libraries and
tcl extensions in 2_0 have been completely re-engineered. The major
enhancement in 2_0 is to provide support for incremental graph layouts.

At this time graphviz_2_0 is not backward compatible or feature
compatible with graphviz_1_x. Major applications like dot
and lefty are no longer included. Their functionality will eventually
be available through tcl scripts, but at this time the new layout engines
are not capable of the sizes of graph that the earlier release could
support.

The code was developed primarily on Solaris-2 and Irix versions of
Unix. The code should be portable to other flavors of Unix and also to PCs
and Macs, but we need to do some work on configuration facilities for
the package.

Although there are tcldg and tkdg executables built by this package
they are intended only for testing. The main product is the libtcldg.so
dynamically loadable extension for tcl7.5 and wish4.1.
Applications are expected to be written as tcl scripts which load this
extension when needed.

A few example applications are included:

tcldg/examples/example - the example from the Tcl96 Usenix paper
tcldg/examples/dg - a simple graph editor

tcldg/dged/dged - a graph editor for semantic graphs

The first two are single file examples. The last is a fairly
major application that I'm still actively working on.

This package was written by:
Stephen North no...@research.att.com - C libraries
John Ellson ell...@lucent.com - tcldg extension and tcl applications

This software is available from:

http://www.research.att.com/orgs/ssr/book/reuse

John Ellson July 1, 1996
--
John Ellson (ell...@lucent.com)