Automatic graph layout in diagrams

agentydragon commented 4 years ago

Describe the problem

I've made a bunch of diagrams where from the start, I didn't know what the final diagram will end up looking like, as I keep adding nodes and edges in a creative process.

When I do that, I often end up drawing the diagram with a lot of crossing edges.

Then, to make the graph more readable, I end up manually laying it out for a minute to make the edges not cross so much.

Feature implementation

Put in a button to automatically lay out the diagram if it's planar.

Extra points for:

Nicely laying out DAGs from "sources" to "sinks" - this is useful for example for dependency diagrams for tasks.
Allowing you to "freeze" some nodes in place and laying out the rest.

Additional context

There are algorithms for planar graph layout that run in O(n).

Itshalffull commented 4 years ago

+1, I would use graph layout way more regularly if it had this. As is, I usually jump out to another graph editing program that has this feature, and paste image in Roam.

agentydragon commented 4 years ago

By the way, for how I would like to use the feature (to draw e.g. dependency relationships between tasks which Roam pages), it would also help to have a customizable graph view generated from, say, a Depends on:: [[Task1]] [[Task2]] attribute. See:

Roam-Research / issues

Automatic graph layout in diagrams #383