How to set the 'spring' force with graphviz for compact graph layouts

Question

I'm generating diagram with graphviz and I have a problem - there are several nodes that are very large - and large number of small nodes. I tried generating png with neato and fdp but both generate very large graphics, which are mostly blank (nodes are very far apart). Is there a way to set a larger spring 'strength' for these tools to force nodes closer together?

Answer 1

When using neato, you may fiddle with the overlap and with the sep attribute.

overlap can be set to false, compress, scalexy, and more.

sep may either designate an additive margin when used with a preceding plus sign, otherwise the margin is defined by scaling the node's size with 1 + the value of sep. It seems that the default

Don't hesitate to post a sample graph. Not knowing your particular graph, I made an example containing some big and some small nodes:

layout=neato;
overlap=scalexy; //false, compress, ...
sep="+1"; // 0.1, +1

node[label="Large node", width=2, height=2];
l1; l2; l3;
node[label="\N", width=0.5, height=0.3];
1 -> l1;
2 -> l1;
3 -> l1;
4 -> l1;
5 -> l1;
5 -> l2;
6 -> l2;
7 -> l2;
8 -> l2;
8 -> l3;
9 -> l3;
10 -> l3;