Offline Drawing of Dynamic Trees: Algorithmics and Document Integration

Malte Skambath, Till Tantau

Abstract

While the algorithmic drawing of static trees is well-understood and well-supported by software tools, creating animations depicting how a tree changes over time is currently difficult: software support, if available at all, is not integrated into a document production workflow and algorithmic approaches only rarely take temporal information into consideration. During the production of a presentation or a paper, most users will visualize how, say, a search tree evolves over time by manually drawing a sequence of trees. We present an extension of the popular TEX typesetting system that allows users to specify dynamic trees inside their documents, together with a new algorithm for drawing them. Running TEX on the documents then results in documents in the svg format with visually pleasing embedded animations. Our algorithm produces animations that satisfy a set of natural aesthetic criteria when possible. On the negative side, we show that one cannot always satisfy all criteria simultaneously and that minimizing their violations is NP-complete.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGraph Drawing and Network Visualization
EditorsYifan Hu, Martin Nöllenburg
Number of pages15
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Publication date08.12.2016
Pages572-586
ISBN (Print)978-3-319-50105-5
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-319-50106-2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 08.12.2016
EventGD 2016 - Athens, Greece
Duration: 19.09.201621.09.2016

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