UNFLATTEN(1)

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version 16.1.0 · 3 versions
, in alpine 3.22, alpine 3.23, alpine 3.24, arch rolling, fedora 43, fedora 44, nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable, opensuse-leap 16.0, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 UNFLATTEN(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the unflatten page from the General Commands Manual — she's a graph-glow-up girlie and she's about to fix ur ugly layouts ✨

✨ NAME ✨

unflatten — adjust directed graphs to improve layout aspect ratio 🦋

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

unflatten [-f?]  [-llen] [-clen ] [ -o outfile ] [ files ]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so unflatten is a preprocessor to dot, and her whole job is making graphs look less unhinged 💅. Specifically, she improves the aspect ratio of graphs that have a ton of leaves or disconnected nodes — bc ngl, the usual layout for a graph like that is so wide or so tall it's giving "screenshot won't fit on the slide" 😭.

What she does is create chains with invisible edges, or adjust the minlen on edges, to improve layout compaction. Lowkey iconic behaviour fr fr. 👑

✨ OPTIONS ✨

the following options are supported, and yes we're listing every single one:

  • -l len — the minlen of leaf edges gets staggered between 1 and len (and len is a small integer, so don't get crazy with it).
  • -f — applies the -l option to fanout nodes whose indegree and outdegree are both 1. This helps with structures such as a -> {w x y z} -> b. 🫶
heads up bestie: this option only works if the -l flag is set. No -l, no -f magic. that's just the rules.
  • -c len — form disconnected nodes into chains of up to len edges. 🎀
  • -o outfile — causes the output to be written to the specified file; by default, output is written to stdout. (yes, the default is stdout, she said what she said)
  • -? — prints the usage and exits. short, sweet, iconic. 🙈

✨ OPERANDS ✨

the following operand is supported:

  • files — names of files containing 1 or more graphs in dot format. If no files operand is specified, the standard input will be used. 🌸

✨ AUTHORS ✨

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

the literal main characters of this whole thing, we stan 🧚💜

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

gc(1), dot(1), acyclic(1), gvpr(1), gvcolor(1), ccomps(1), tred(1), libgraph(3)

the whole friend group, go say hi 🌈

and that's the page!! this version dropped way back on 21 January 2001 as part of the unflatten(1) manual — old money, timeless vibe. love that for her. mwah 💖✨

📦 where this page comes from