How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes

Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by anonymous532 on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @02:47PM (#29654120)

It's cute and definitely a great way to "draw S-curved arrow between boxes", but, under the assumption of being built to be used within a real project with dozens or hundreds of overlapping connections, this, like many other node systems, fails to be usable unless you push the complexity somewhere else.

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by dragonwriter on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @05:11PM (#29656117)

Is someone selling it as some kind of universal solution for production diagramming problems of all scales, or is this just unnecessary negativity?

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by anamexis on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @03:01PM (#29654283)

> under the assumption of being built to be used within a real project with dozens or hundreds of overlapping connections

This is an odd assumption to make.

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by AceJohnny2 on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @04:21PM (#29655409)

Not so weird. Here's a random example, from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force-directed_graph_drawing#/...

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by TobTobXX on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @05:18PM (#29656205)

These are straight lines. Not sure you even _want_ Bézier curves in this context, striaght lines are probably clearer in these graphs with hundreds of connections.

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by AceJohnny2 on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @08:09PM (#29657561)

Ah, good point.

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by quickthrower2 on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @03:47PM (#29654949)

In that case the tool would need to lay out everything holistically but while it might do great arrow wise it could be useless for the user if they wanted the diagram a certain way for a reason.

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by anonymous532 on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @03:58PM (#29655096)

Yes, that is what I've noticed too. On medium/big projects macro-level(holistic) arrow functionality is far more important than having beautifully curved arrows from node A to node B. Solving that problem strangely resembles routing on a circuit board with buses, labels, colors, layers etc.

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by kevin_thibedeau on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @05:34PM (#29656364)

There is a section in Graphics Gems 3 that describes a layout system for an Atari ST DAW app.

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by drudru on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @11:08PM (#29658546)

Which chapter in Gems III has this? I couldn’t find it.

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by monkeycantype on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @07:15PM (#29657165)

but it's solving one part of the problem, and doing a good job at it. I've been making diagrams using graphviz, but setting the positions and edge curves manually, pulling the nodes and edges out of a list in excel

https://github.com/mathew-j-davis/boxesandarrows

I've been setting the 'waypoints' for more complex curves (curves with many bends) manually (typing the bezier numbers in by hand), while I try and figure out how I want them routed, you're right it's not easy figuring out rules for where edge should go, let alone implementing it

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by arendtio on Thursday December 23, 2021 @03:08AM (#29659735)

I think it depends on the use case and the organization/ordering of the boxes, which is not the focus of this library.

So for example, if the user is responsible for organizing the boxes and there is also a way to create custom arrows, this library can be used to suggest arrows, which might be good 95% of the time. That would be better than many of the tools I have used over the years.

However, if you want to generate a final diagram and can't guarantee, that the order of boxes doesn't allow for overlapping connections, this library is probably the wrong choice.

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Re:How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes by mbrodersen on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @07:46PM (#29657408)

I don’t think the author is making any claims about the algorithm being able to handle more than the 2 box case. Why the negativity?

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