While working on some firewall log analysis, I started working on AfterGlow 1.2, which is going to have the capability to turn of the node labels on a per node type basis. In addition, if you turn the labels off, the node also becomes much smaller.

But what was really interesting is that while I was browsing the man pages for graphviz, I discovered that fdp has a node attribute called pin. This got me quite excited. If pin is true, that node will remain at its initial position. Don’t ask me how that would work in reality? What is the initial position? How do you define that? Not sure, but I’ll figure it out. This would get me closer to the animated graphs!

Digging a bit deaper in the graphviz documentation, I realized that neato can also pin a node, by adding a ! to the pos argument of a node:
node [ pos = "2,2!" ];

To solve the animation, one probably has to generate a graph with the -Tplain option, then get the x and y coordinates (second and third argument to the node entries) of the graph and use them as input for the next graph.