aiSee User Manual: Drawing Phase

Finally, the graph is drawn in a window or exported to a bitmap, PostScript or SVG file. Edges can be drawn as polygon segments or splines, however spline drawing is slower (indicated by the d message character in the message window).

Message characters

Graph layout and drawing is a rather complex process. aiSee issues messages in the form of a single character to indicate its state. This is useful in following the progress of layout calculation and for tuning layout speed. The table below lists the layout phases along with the corresponding message characters.

Character Layout phase Character Layout phase
a Parsing m Pendulum method
f Folding c Rubberband method
p Rank assignment S Straight-line phase
u Unmerge connected components e Edge bending
b Crossing reduction, phase 1 d Spline drawing
B Crossing reduction, phase 2 q Force-directed layout
l Local crossing optimization t Timeout
T Tree layout x PostScript export operation