Many years (and computers) ago I made a number of dot files. I kept all the dot files and the jpg’s I made from them and a guide to using dot. Now I want to edit them and make more (on a Windows 10 computer) so I downloaded GraphViz. I installed it according to the very nice instructions on this forum and rebooted for good measure. There’s one detail I can’t find, though: How do I run/open GraphViz? There’s a folder in my Start menu, but it only contains “Uninstall.” Do I need another program? Do I use a command line to convert the code into pictures?
You can start a cmd window (or a powershell window) and then type the standard command line stuff:
This works:
dot -Tsvg myfile.gv >myfile.svg
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The provided answer with the command line is the accurate one, yet as your question was inclined to some kind of gui, it’s worth mentionning the hosted graphviz on webservers that offer a convenient text to graph conversion. An example mentioned in the official graphviz Resources page is this one :
This is obviously more convenient as it does not require any install but not appropriate for offline usage nor for confidential data.
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Various editors (such as Atom and VSCode) have extensions for enabling graphviz preview functionality - you could try that out.
so there’s no offline Windows-based graphical interface for creating and editing and rendering Graphviz graphs?
I’ve installed graphviz 2.50.0 and previous versions and it has a checkbox to install a desktop icon. there’s no desktop icon on my Win10 install as Administrator.
what is the desktop icon supposed to do? Bring up a GUI or a command line? what program is that icon pointing to?
the windows installation seemed to work but the result is not clear at all.
I believe the (nonexistent) icon is/was supposed to bring up a cmd window.