Visualization with graphviz

To understand package dependency sometimes it is easier to visualize.

Note:

The necessary tools were installed with the reference installation as shown in the latex chapter. Test it with small apt packages first. For packages like kile or firefox the drawing will take to lang and would cause a high cpu usage.

Legend:

Graphviz brings a rich set of graph drawing tools.

For the following example we need dotty and optionally nop and dot2tex

• dotty: A Customizable Graph Editor
• nop: pretty-print graph file
• dot2tex: Graphviz to LaTeX converter

Exercise:

• Create a dotty File for small packages like apt, aptitude, debconf, bash :

apt-cache dotty apt > ~/dotty.ps

• View the created file

dotty ~/dotty.ps

The dotty application opens in a small view. Maximize the window dragging with the mouse to view the whole graphic.

• Convert the file to a pretty-print graph file

nop ~/dotty.ps > ~/nop.ps

• Check the output

open the pretty-print file ~/nop.ps and check the colours and replace with common colour names if necessary.

e.g.the word "springgreen" with "green"

dot2tex -d ~/nop.ps > ~/poster.tex

• open the file dotty.tex and replace

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article} with
\documentclass[a0,portrait]{a0poster}

Last but not least:

• create a pdf file

From commandline:

Just type:

pdflatex poster.tex poster.pdf

Using Kile:

Load the texfile in kile and convert it to pdf. Now you have your own A0 Poster with one of your favorite applications :)