unflatten - Man Page

• Adjust one or more directed graphs to improve the layout aspect ratio: unflatten path/to/input1.gv path/to/input2.gv ... > path/to/output.gv
• Use unflatten as a preprocessor for dot layout to improve aspect ratio: unflatten path/to/input.gv | dot -T png path/to/output.png
• Display help: unflatten -?

tldr.sh

unflatten [-f?] [-llen] [-clen ] [ -o outfile ] [ files ]

unflatten is a preprocessor to dot that is used to improve the aspect ratio of graphs having many leaves  or disconnected nodes. The usual layout for such a graph is generally very wide or tall.   unflatten inserts invisible edges or adjusts the minlen on edges to improve layout compaction.

The following options are supported:

-l len

The minimum length of leaf edges is staggered between 1 and len (a small integer).  

-f

Enables the staggering of the -l option to fanout nodes whose indegree and outdegree are both 1. This helps with structures such as a -> {w x y z} -> b. This option only works if the -l flag is set.

-c len

Form disconnected nodes into chains of up to len nodes.

-o outfile

causes the output to be written to the specified file; by default, output is written to stdout.

-?

Prints the usage and exits.

The following operand is supported:

files

Names of files containing 1 or more graphs in dot format. If no files operand is specified, the standard input will be used.

Stephen C. North <north@research.att.com>
Emden R. Gansner <erg@research.att.com>

gc(1), dot(1), acyclic(1), gvpr(1), gvcolor(1), ccomps(1), tred(1), libgraph(3)