GVCOLOR(1)

💖 GVCOLOR — the flow-colors-through-a-ranked-digraph girlie 💖

okay bestie, so this is gvcolor from the General Commands Manual section (that's section 1, the "run me in your shell" section, iykyk). She's a filter, she's iconic, she's been around since 2001 and she still ate. let's get into it 💅

✨ NAME ✨

gvcolor — flow colors through a ranked digraph 🌈

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

gvcolor [ files ]

🎀 USAGE 🎀

dot file.gv | gvcolor | dot -T<format>

that's the whole vibe. pipe in, pipe out, no cap.

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So gvcolor (she used to go by colorize back in the day, glow-up era) is a filter that sets node colors from initial seed values. Colors flow along edges from tail to head, and at each node they get averaged — as HSB vectors, because she's precise like that.

⚠️ the graph must have already been processed by dot first. she's not doing that part for you, babe.

The way it works: pick your initial colors right and you get drawings where node colors help emphasize logical relationships between nodes — even when those nodes are spread far apart in the layout. like, they're still matching, they still found each other, main character energy fr fr 🫶

Initial colors must be set externally, using the color attribute of a node. The classic move is to assign colors to a few key source or sink nodes, manually setting their colors by editing the graph file. Color names are as in dot(1): symbolic names or RGB triples. 💖

It is best to choose some easily‐distinguished but related colors — not necessarily spaced evenly around the color wheel. For example, blue_green, green, and light_yellow looks better than red, green, blue. (yes, that's the actual tea from the manual, and she's right, the related palette ate 💀)

Certain graph attributes control the gvcolor algorithm:

• flow=back — reverses the flow of colors from heads to tails 🔄
• saturation=.1,.9 (or any two numbers between 0 and 1) — adjusts the color saturation linearly from least to greatest rank 🎨
• Defcolor — if this is set, this color value is applied to any node not otherwise colored 👑

💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

The following exit values are returned:

1. 0 — Successful completion. slay ✨
2. 1 — If nodes of the graph do not possess a ``pos'' attribute. 💔

🙈 BUGS 🙈

It would be nice to make the program work without relying on an initial pass through dot. (she said what she said, bestie, that's the note 😭)

👑 AUTHORS 👑

• Stephen C. North <north@research.att.com>
• Emden R. Gansner <erg@research.att.com>

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

gc(1), dot(1), gvpr(1), ccomps(1), sccmap(1), tred(1), libgraph(3)

and that's the whole page bestie — brought to you by the 21 March 2001 edition of the GVCOLOR(1) manual page, version one, still serving looks 💖✨🎀