This ipelet gives Ipe access to the graph drawing functions provided by Tikz. See below for installation instructions.
Draw a graph, for instance the following:
Select all its nodes and vertices, and call the desired layout method
of the ipelet. (You'll need to read the Tikz manual to understand the
precise options.) Here is the result if you choose spring electrical layout:
The ipelet uses a simple heuristic to determine edges and vertices of the graph:
-
A path object with a single open curve is considered an edge.
-
A group object (e.g. a box with a text label inside, grouped together), a text object, or a refence to a symbol is considered a vertex.
-
The ipelet uses the bounding box of each vertex to determine which vertices are connected by an edge. If your vertices are very close together (or even overlap), this will not work correctly.
Copy the file graphdrawing.lua into one of your ipelet directories
(see Help -> Show configuration in Ipe).
You will need to edit the file to indicate the location of the Tikz
graph drawing library in the variable pgf_gd_path (about line 11 in
graphdrawing.lua).
To find the correct location, run kpsewhich gd.lua from the command
line, like this:
$ kpsewhich gd.lua
/usr/local/texlive/2015/texmf-dist/tex/generic/pgf/graphdrawing/lua/pgf/gd.lua
The correct variable setting is obtained by deleting /pgf/gd.lua from
the end of this string, in this case it would be
local pgf_gd_path = "/usr/local/texlive/2015/texmf-dist/tex/generic/pgf/graphdrawing/lua"
If your Latex installation does not contain Tikz, or only a version of
Tikz earlier than Tikz 3.0, then kpsewhich gd.lua will not find
anything. In this case you will need to download the Tikz library
yourself, from https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgf/files/latest/download.
Unzip the package anywhere you like, e.g. into $HOME/Devel/tikz.
The correct variable setting for graphdrawing.lua is then:
local pgf_gd_path = "/home/otfried/Devel/tikz/tex/generic/pgf/graphdrawing/lua"