I've been using Graphviz for a few months now and it's been really helpful for creating visualizations of complex data. It's easy to use and the output is clear and concise. Highly recommended!
Graphviz is intended to create graphs of various types as a way to illustrate relations and principles. In this respect, the tool can specifically help you create and render graphs using DOT, a language used by graph-drawing software from Python.
This software package comprises various programs, most of them without a GUI, except for GVEdit. Although its interface looks quite simple and does not have many commands or buttons, the user practically needs to guess what to do next, because, unfortunately, it is not very intuitive. To make things worse, there is not even a help document. However, there is a series of downloadable examples of the supported languages you can use as a start. Needless to say, knowledge of DOT is required.
Graphs can be created both from scratch and by modifying others. The process of creating a new graph starts by creating its objects and then adding nodes and edges. At this point, you can check the generated source code, which you may finally render and save. Luckily, the tool also allows previewing the layout and adjusting the graph to meet your specific needs.
It is good to hear that the tool supports various layout engines, including DOT, FDP, NEATOR, NOP, OSAGE, CIRCO, PATCHWORK and SFDP. Likewise, it lets you export graphs to other formats. In this regard, various picture formats (BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF) are supported as well as some document formats (PDF, EPS, TXT).
To conclude, Graphviz can help you create and preview various types of graphs, mostly diagrams showing the connections between their components. The product is open-source, so there is no cost in trying. Yet, I must alert you that it may take you some hours before you can fully exploit its advantages.
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