Graphviz

One of the easiest ways to understand or learn the principles of engineering, bioinformatics, design or networking is to create graphs, visualize them and make connections. Graphviz is a feature-packed software solution that can be used by all those who want to preview diagrams or graphs created for various domains.

The application runs without special requirements so you get started with its user-friendly graphic interface within seconds after you install it.

Graphviz enables you to create new diagrams from scratch or you can open existing ones, so as to preview their contents or modify them.

You can start by loading a certain graph, previewing the layout, then adjust its settings as you see fit - as soon as you perform a change, you can re-load the layout so as to make sure you have indeed modified the intended part of the chart.

Depending on the type of project you want to work on, Graphviz enables you to choose the layout engine that suits your needs best: dot, circo, fdp, neato, nop, nop1, nop2, osage, patchwork or sfdp.

You also get to select the target format that should be used for exporting the graph once you are done working on it, namely you can choose between BMP, PNG, JPE, JPEG, PDF, EPS, metafile, cmap, fig, SVG, plain, PS2, TIFF, VML and many others.

You can also set the scope you prefer, be it graph, node or edge, then specify the name type and the values you want to add.

Graphviz can help users not only preview and visualize connections within their graphs, but they can also create and modify diagrams representing a wide range of networks. Nonetheless, novices are advised to spend some time analyzing the documentation before venturing to test the app’s functions.