TopDraw: a structure network visualiser for PHIGS

This paper presents TopDraw, a portable programming tool for visualising PHIGS structure networks, by automatically documenting their topology using diagrams. Drawing tidy representations of graphs algorithmically is a difficult problem, and most existing systems are large, complex and specialised. The alternative approach taken in TopDraw is to use a fast, straightforward algorithm supplemented when necessary by an interactive 'tidier'. A novel feature of TopDraw is that the diagrams it produces are themselves PHIGS structures, which the application may edit and manipulate as required. TopDraw is a component of the PHIGS Toolkit, an emerging set of portable integrated tools for PHIGS environments.