"Best to think of Graphviz as a competent but unruly teenager"
and then just be glad you did not have to do the work yourself.
It would probably be helpful to the community if we could add a layout plugin to allow users to specify layouts in some absolute or relative grid format, to avoid all the invisible edge and edge length hackery. We just need appropriate funding.
We have some amazing maintainers who work on gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz now, but the think is, there are far more bug reporters than bug fixers. The first gen of Graphviz authors are timing out, so we very few people are around now to fix relatively deep semantic or logical bugs, c.f. https://xkcd.com/2347/
Best regards, Graphviz the Project
In case you come back to revisit ... First I will note my comment appears nested one level deeper than I had been aiming for which may make it sound less positive than I intended. Second, Graphviz doesn't need to do anything to appease control freaks. You have been absolutely rocking it for decades. The important part of my glib description is 'competent' and to accept the very, very fair tradeoff between; already done with minimal effort and satisfying some fashion police insisting you do it their way when in reality they can't produce results themselves.
The bottom line is, I can not thank you enough for releasing your software way back when I built it on my Amiga, you have been a constant companion in my career.
I use scripts to manually place everything from data in csv files.
What do you mean? You can always specify the exact coordinates of some vertices:
3 [pos="20,30"]
Pos doesn’t work with most layout engines (most notably dot), making it kinda useless, and graphviz doesn’t easily expose the dimensions of a node to accommodate dynamic layout. You can work around that, but that’s nowhere near as ergonomic as some sort of “tree level”-like argument that would force a node to position at a certain Y-coord while leaving the automatic layout process otherwise intact.
I tend to stay away from Graphviz a lot more than I otherwise would these days due to the lack of manual formatting controls (have spent waaaayyy too many hours writing code to add invisible edges between certain nodes to force row-ordered layouts).