Newbie, force a graph to fit a letter page size for printing?

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1

Hi, just discovered this tool via AI, am still reading docs. It’s probably a bit early to ask this but I didn’t see it documented how to force a graph to fit onto one sheet of paper? And AI has not been very helpful, as it still isn’t the best at reading docs.

Looking at this stackoverflow post, although it refers to bitmap and thus not SVG, would this be the current, correct approach to use in the PNG case? It looks tedious to assign it to each node individually, and such an approach may easily break so I want to assume there’s a better way.. well, if we know that some X width and Y height represent the bounds of a letter sized paper, and we can do basic math to count the nodes/edges (N) on one side of the graph tree, we can define the max-height of a node or edge allowed as Y/N. In general I don’t want to hardcode this unless I know the engine won’t handle it.

I know I need to do more research, it’s only been a couple hours of reading docs and online playgrounds. Asking questions early might prevent me from getting lost on a tangent and wasting hours of work though

Essentially, this question boils down to:

  1. Is there a built-in way from graphviz to tell an engine i.e. dot, hey, render a vertical Top Bottom graph with 11 nodes, 10 edges between nodes, make it fit on a single sheet of letter sized (or whatever) paper?
  2. Do tools or ecosystem built around the graphviz tool already include this functionality? if so, which ones?
  3. If neither are available, what do you do to accomplish this? (especially if its trivial)
  4. Was the stackoverflow post correct? graphviz - Controlling bitmap rendering - Stack Overflow
2

Good luck, I haven’t done this before, but here are some pointers:

For printing I’d consider outputting PDF, a format designed for printing: https://graphviz.org/docs/outputs/pdf/

The aspect ratio attribute might also be helpful: https://graphviz.org/docs/attrs/ratio/

And how to set size of pages: https://graphviz.org/docs/attrs/page/

3

You can definitely achieve the diagram you want as mentioned in (1). As for single sheet of paper, most print facilities have a fit-to-page option. I’ve worked on a system to auto-generated dependency diagrams from a CMDB and one of the diagrams is over 5 feet wide. “Fit-to-page” as-is wouldn’t work because it would be reduced to the point of not being readable, in which case if the length of the diagram does not exceed by much the width of your paper, print it sideways and fit to page. Or tile-print it. AI is most likely aware of GraphViz and its grammar. Use of pdf format has the added benefit of the text being searchable. This is especially helpful with large diagrams. Take a look at the examples and source to understand the behavior.