Sometimes I wish there were a more modern replacement for Graphviz. There are things that it doesn't handle very well (e.g., nested subgraphs) and I feel like there are good (albeit proprietary) algorithms which could make their way into a general package.

I use dot, and manually position everything, then use the neato -n2 option to render:

`dot -T ${format} -n${n} ${verbose>1?"-v ":""}-Goverlap-true -Gsplines=false -Kneato -o "${ output }" "${ input }"`

this still doesn't do subgraphs well,

so I sometime do the 'groups' in a separate document, then composite the layers with image magick

`magick composite ${verbose>1?"-verbose ":""}-gravity NorthWest "${a}" "${b}" "${png_output}"`;

Cool, I appreciate you sharing the info on your process!

You’re welcome

Not as easy to use, because it does not have a simple cli, but nested layouts are better than dot's with the Eclipse Layout Kernel. There is a JavaScript version, as well and you can try it in recent plantuml versions.

[0] https://www.eclipse.org/elk

[1] https://github.com/eclipse/elk

[2] https://plantuml.com/elk

Agree.

Also, this is a great problem, and we tried to solve it in a more general context. http://dpd.cs.princeton.edu/Papers/DGKN97.pdf

I believe it's an open problem what makes a curve look "natural" or how to do a good job of routing multiple splines around obstacles so they do not intersect each other, though the work of Keean Crane at CMU seems promising: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/RepulsiveCurves/ind...

This is a great github to play around with dot online: https://dreampuf.github.io/GraphvizOnline/