Bug 458890

Description Alexander Nyßen 2015-02-01 06:46:05 EST

Within the dot4zest documentation, Fabian sketched his idea of animation support. I removed this part from the documentation (as all other future ideas have already been incorporated into respective bugzillas), and created this bugzilla to keep track of it.

Add animation support using something like subgraph cluster_animation_1 { label = "Step 1"; 1->2 } etc., where animation steps are represented as subgraphs in the DOT input (which if rendered with Graphviz results in a static description of the animation)
For instance, for the input below a Zest animation could be created that changes like this (this is an experimental illustation of the idea):

digraph SampleAnimation {
 /* We can specify a Zest layout for the animation here: */
 layout=tree // = TreeLayoutAlgorithm
 /* Global attributes can be defined for edges and nodes: */
 node[label="Node"]
 edge[label="Edge" style=dotted]
 1;2;3;4;5
 /* The single animation steps are marked by numbers: */
 subgraph cluster_animation_0{ 1 -> 2 [label="Dashed" style=dashed]}
 subgraph cluster_animation_1{ 1 -> 3 }
 subgraph cluster_animation_2{ 3 -> 4; 3 -> 5}
}

After the first step:

https://wiki.eclipse.org/images/7/7e/DotZestM5Screenshot1.png

And the final state of the graph:

https://wiki.eclipse.org/images/3/38/DotZestM5Screenshot2.png

The same input file, exported with Graphviz, shows the animation steps as subgraphs:

https://wiki.eclipse.org/images/6/67/DotZestAnimatedExport.png

A possible use case for defining such animations with DOT is to easily create animated documentation, e.g. to explain data structures. The same file defining the animation could be used to export a PDF illustrating the steps in a static way.