GraphViz for Mac OS X

GraphViz is a collection of graph visualization tools. For more information about it, see:

• The GraphViz open source graph drawing software's website.
• The development home of the Graph Visualization Project.

This site hosts a few GraphViz-related items:

• A true and proper port for Mac OS X, including Quartz/Quicktime support in the back-end and an Aqua GUI, had been carried out by Glen Low, at Pixelglow Software. This work has been done together with GraphViz' original AT&T developers, Stephen C. North et. al. This port's additions have been submitted for inclusion in the main GrapViz source tree, and are expected to appear there upon approval by the main development team.
  This is probably the best way to get GraphViz for Mac OS X installed.
• GraphViz is also available in DarwinPorts. If you have a Mac OS X workstation and are interested in installing Unix software packages, you probably want to check out DarwinPorts, and the excellent work-in-progress application that comes with it called Ports Manager.
• For those to whom Fink is a viable and acceptable way of installing Unix software on their Mac OS X workstations: I've been told GraphViz is available through fink, and installs like a dream.
• The release available here is 1.10. This release has been built with the GNU Compiler Collection 3.3.
  This is a bare-bones GraphViz build, created using just a vanilla Mac OS X 10.3.x install including Developer Tools and X11. If you want to add extra features, feel free to compile your own kit (see below).
• Previous GraphViz builds can be found in the archive.
• GraphViz (self-contained, hopefully):
  • Installer package (disk image with Installer package).
    This installs the entire GraphViz suite in /usr/local. You can install it elsewhere, but you'll need to run a little script afterwards if you do; see below.
  • Tarball (gzipped tar archive).
    Unpack it whereever you fancy, then point your PATH and MANPATH environment variables to the proper locations. If you don't know how to do all that, look one notch up.
  • If you install GraphViz in another place than /usr/local, you need to run the relocate-graphviz script (included in the distribution), or the GraphViz executables will not be able to find the GraphViz dynamic libraries:
    $ /where/you/installed/graphviz/bin/relocate-graphviz
    Instead of modifying your installation for its new location, you can also work around the library binding problem by settin the environment variable DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH to the directory containing the GraphViz "dylib" files, i.e.
    $ export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/where/you/installed/graphviz/lib/graphviz or, depending on which breed of login shell you use,
    % setenv DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH /where/you/installed/graphviz/lib/graphviz.
• You may also want to build it yourself, of course. In that case, read the Notes on Building GraphViz.
• Clean PDF-renderings (they're so easy to make on Mac OS X) of some GraphViz documentation:
  • Drawing graphs with dot, the dot user's guide
  • Neato User's guide

Brought to you by Jeroen Scheerder <js@phil.uu.nl>.