Sharp Ideas

Dot and neato are two utility applications that are bundled with graphviz.  Dot is used for creating directed graphs, neato draws undirected graphs.

Using dot from the command-line couldn’t be easier.  Here’s a simple example:

dot -Tsvg fsm.dot -o fsm.svg

This creates an SVG image of the finite state machine (fsm) defined in the text file fsm.dot.

Using neato is just as easy:

neato -Tsvg fsm.dot -o fsm.svg