Here is a link to a gvpr program that will order nodes within a subgraph in the order they were entered :
https://gist.github.com/steveroush/333b02e1e622c19c3a9e426b97f6fc25
Here is the README:
keepOrder.gvpr is a GVPR program that can be used to rearrange nodes within a Graphviz (DOT) graph. Specifically, keepOrder.gvpr will make sure that all nodes within a subgraph will be displayed in the order that they were defined, as long as that subgraph has two attributes:
- rank must be set to any of the legal values defined by Graphviz (https://graphviz.org/docs/attrs/rank/)
- a new attribute, keepOrder must be set to true. Note that if keepOrder is set at the Root graph-level, it will be inherited by all subgraphs.
below is a command line to run the keepOrder program:
dot -GkeepOrder=true -Gphase=2 myfile.gv | dot -Gphase="" | gvpr -cf keepOrder.gvpr | neato -Gsplines=true -n2 -Tpng >out.png
Note:
-Gphase=true can be on the command line or added to your input
likewise,
-GkeepOrder=true can be invoked within the input
at the Root-level
or
at the graph-level (not the cluster-level)
setting the phase attribute to 2 will cause dot to calculate all the
ranks and the "order" of the nodes within each rank and annotate the file
with that added info
[GVPR (https://www.graphviz.org/pdf/gvpr.1.pdf) is one of the Graphviz programs, just like DOT.]
And before & after example:
