Creating figures

[grhawk]

Hi,
it would be very nice to have a tool that creates a graph (hypergraph) on as a graphical representation. Are you aware of anything that goes in that direction?

[mohawk2]

I'm looking for something similar, inspired by Gallo et al's Directed Hypergraphs and Applications.

Sadly Graphviz doesn't seem to elegantly allow invisible nodes with edges entering and exiting in the same direction (which I'd call a "through node"). But this looks promising, using LaTeX: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/108064/typesetting-a-directed-hypergraph-in-tikz

Did you find anything else?

[mohawk2]

I've proposed to the Graphviz folks to add hypergraph support: https://gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz/-/issues/1911

[mohawk2]

Additional notes on the above: the LaTeX answer was really using Asymptote. It looks like https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Directed_hypergraph_example.svg has similar code (in XML comments) to achieve a similar aim.

[tmmurali]

@grhawk @mohawk2 I am sorry for the very late reply. This issue escaped my notice. Drawing directed hypegraphs is a challenging problem. I do not recall good algorithms for this problem. The discussion on Graphviz's GitLab page suggests many good options that come close.

The hack that I am aware of is to convert the directed hypergraph into a bipartite graph: every hyperedge (S, T) becomes a new type of node u, with edges coming into u from every node in S and edges leaving u to every node in T. Then draw the bipartite graph like a standard directed graph but with the new type of node in a different shape. Needless to say, the layouts do not look pretty.