I’m making trees with dot and I generally want GV to arrange the nodes, but occasionally I want to pick the order of parent or child nodes. This page Node, Edge and Graph Attributes tells me dot has a node/graph attribute called “ordering” that can be set to “in” or “out,” but there’s no sample code, so I tried every variation I could think of and finally got “ordering=out” to work. I’m putting in a pared-down version of my code; I want to swap dotD and orsD where noted.
[dot verbose=true]
strict digraph ors {
node [shape=none]
ors ordering=out // this puts orso, orsa in order
ors → orso → arsazGm → {earsOE aersMD}
earsOE → arsME → ass
aersMD → orsD
{dotD orsD} → dodorsD // dotD, orsD are swapped; I want them in this order
dodorsD → dodoP → dodo
ors → orsa → ouraG
{skia ouraG} → skiourosG → sciurusL → scuriolusL → esquirelAN → squirelME → squirrel
kwon → kuon
{kuon ouraG} → kunosuraG → cyosuraL → cynosureF → cynosure
ouraG → ouroG → uroNL → uroE
subgraph E { rank=same ass dodo squirrel cynosure uroE }
}
[/dot]
I believe that this should do what you want: dodorsD [ordering=in]
But, there is a known bug: ordering=out is not being obeyed (#1152) · Issues · graphviz / graphviz · GitLab
So here is a work-around:
strict digraph ors {
node [shape=none]
ors ordering=out // this puts orso, orsa in order
ors → orso → arsazGm → {earsOE aersMD}
earsOE → arsME → ass
aersMD → orsD
dodorsD [ordering=in] // I believe this should do it, but there is a bug
{rank=same dotD → orsD [style=invis]} // dotD, orsD are swapped; I want them in this order
dotD → dodorsD // dotD, orsD are swapped; I want them in this order
orsD → dodorsD // dotD, orsD are swapped; I want them in this order
dodorsD → dodoP → dodo
ors → orsa → ouraG
{skia ouraG} → skiourosG → sciurusL → scuriolusL → esquirelAN → squirelME → squirrel
kwon → kuon
{kuon ouraG} → kunosuraG → cyosuraL → cynosureF → cynosure
ouraG → ouroG → uroNL → uroE
subgraph E { rank=same ass dodo squirrel cynosure uroE }
}
The invisible edge fixes things:
