[vtkusers] summary ? GUI for VTK

[David Duke]

Mark Beall wrote:
> >* Pipeline viewer
> >+++++++++++++++++
> >         The tricky one :) Visual Representation of the VTK pipeline.
> >         Needless to say that I love the one from Principia Mathematica :
> >
> >http://www.principiamathematica.com/products/pipeline_editor/index.htm
> >
> >         I've got a friend working in Operational Research and Graph
> >Theory, I'm gonna ask him if he could send me some (easy to understand)
> >papers related to this difficult problem that is "Graph layouting". I've
> ....

I'm not sure that what you want here are graph layout algorithms, which
are mostly for fully-automated layout of graphs subject to various
aesthetic criteria. For a pipeline editor, you're dealing more with
graph editing, where the user chooses where the nodes (modules) are
placed.  What you probably want is the ability to move around modules
while maintaining and laying-out the connections in a "nice" way. 
Perhaps as an option (for version n!) you could have the front-end apply
a layout policy to a network.  If you do want to look at layout
algorithms, you might find the following useful:

G. di Battista, P. Eades, R. Tamassia, and I.G. Tollis, Graph Drawing:
Algorithms for the Visualisation of Graphs, Prentice Hall, (1999).

Other links to this area (including tools/implementations) can be found
at http://www.cwi.nl/InfoVisu/links.html


David.


-- 
Dr David Duke                      Department of Computer Science
                                   The University of York
email: duke at cs.york.ac.uk          Heslington, York, YO10 5DD
tel:   +44 1904 432 772            United Kingdom
fax:   +44 1904 432 767
WWW    http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~duke/