On Mon, 30 Jun 2008, Charles P. Schaum wrote:

Question:

Has anyone ever thought of integrating something dot-like into ConTeXt or LaTeX?

Have a look at dot2tex: http://www.fauskes.net/code/dot2tex/ It uses a python script to convert the dot output to tikz or pgf code which can be included in a latex document. This package should also work with ConTeXt with very minor changes and has been in my to be investigated later list for a long time.

One thing that I have done is avail myself of the constrained graphs for doing anything like timelines. It would be fantastic to get that in TeX and friends.

Or would that fall under dot -> MetaPost?

From what I remember, dot can output metapost code. However, the last time I looked, it was really bad at calculating the width of tex math commands (basically counted the width of the ascii markup rather than the typeset command). I do not know how dot2tex gets around this problem, but from the examples on the website, it does a remarkable good job.

Another option is to see if there are lua bindings for dot. In that case, one could probably try to integrate it to luatex directly: find the width of the labels using tex, and then pass them on to dot (using the lua-bindings) to find the appropriate layout of the nodes, and then plot these nodes using metapost or pgf. I think that it will take a lot of work to get such an approach to work correctly, but it would be the cleanest solution. Aditya