This post is the last in a series of articles about PGF/TikZ and its new graph drawing features on which I am working as part of my graduate thesis.

In the previous two posts I gave an introduction to graph drawing, the graph syntax of TikZ and its Lua-based graph drawing engine that can be used to implement automatic graph drawing algorithms and use them to compute layouts for graphs that are to be rendered with TikZ.

For this post, my intention was to demonstrate the algorithms that I implemented as part of my thesis. These algorithms work well with many graphs, including grids, symmetric graphs, flow charts, flow networks and state machines or automata.

However, I decided to just point to the final version of my thesis here. It documents the algorithms extensively and gives many examples of how to use and tweak them. I think the thesis holds information much more useful to users and graph drawing researchers than what I’d be able to put in a regular blog post.

So, here is the official link: 

http://www.tcs.uni-luebeck.de/downloads/papers/2011/2011-configurable-graph-drawing-algorithms-jannis-pohlmann.pdf

If you find mistakes, please keep them to yourself. It still has to be marked by the two reviewers, so I don’t want to know what I did wrong yet. ;)