Re: Automatic diagram layout

[Lars Ræder Clausen <lars raeder dk>]

On Fri, 2009-05-15 at 09:30 -0300, Adriano Bonat wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> I used, with success, "Postgresql autodoc" to reverse engineer my
> database, but it generates a Dia diagram without a layout, and having
> about ~60 tables with several associations would take a lot of my time
> to organize it, and also, wouldn't be the best layout.
> 
> So I was wondering if there isn't already a way to do this layout
> organization. I tried to figure out to maybe try to design the same
> diagram using graphviz and then try to map its calculated coordinates
> to the Dia diagram, but no luck.

There has been some effort at making graphviz output dia files, and I
seem to remember it working, though it's been a while.  Also checkout
Autodia, which is the most advanced autogenerator for Dia.  I will
challenge your claim that a hand-crafted layout would not be the best
layout, though.  An automatic layouter should never be used for more
than a rough draft, as it has no understanding of what belongs where.
The best it can hope for is to make connected things be close together,
but that's not necessarily meaningful.

-Lars