grapher

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Layout

There are multiple ways to layout your graph with grapher, though those can be broken down into two broad categories: static and live. The former pre-computes the positions of the nodes before rendering the visualisation to produce a static graph. The latter does the layout live in the browser.

Computing the layout is computationally expensive and though the live layout looks fancy it quickly becomes unmanageable for the browser as graphs become larger. You will therefore often pre-compute those in R or node js.

By default the graph will use the live layout: it will layout the graph in the browser, unless the object you used to initialise the graph contained nodes coordinates as x, y, and z in which case it will use those to position the nodes on the canvas. If you have those coordinates but do not wish to use them to position the nodes you can remove them with remove_coordinates.

When it comes to pre-computing the layout you have two main choices, 1) use R and compute the coordinates using an igraph layout function, or, if you have the full installation of grapher which includes V8, you can also use the same algorithm as used in the browser but offline. Though there is a suboptimal third option: if you have used the node js ngraph.offline.layout library to compute the layout, you can read the positions.bin file with graph_bin_layout.

Live

You can customise the default live layout with graph_live_layout.

# generate mock data
g <- make_data(200)

# grapher defaults to live layout
graph(g)

# customise the live layout parameters
graph(g) %>% 
  graph_layout_live(gravity = -3)

Since the above is draining on the browser you can stabilise the network after some time by using graph_stable_layout and specifying the number of milliseconds before the layout algorithm is stopped.

graph(g) %>% 
  graph_layout_live() %>% 
  graph_layout_stable(ms = 4000) # stabilise after 4 seconds

Static

By default grapher will use the igraph::layout_nicely function to compute the position of nodes but you can specify any other as method argument. The function also optionally takes a weights argument to specify links weights to take into account.

graph(g) %>% 
  graph_layout_static(method = igraph::layout_with_kk)

Offline

Finally if you have the full installation you can also use the same algorithm as used in the browser but offline, precomputing the nodes positons with graph_offline_layout.

graph(g) %>% 
  graph_layout_offline()

Then again, these do not have to be computed with grapher, you can compute them yourself prior to initialising the graph.

# random coordinates
g$nodes$x <- runif(200, 1, 1000)
g$nodes$y <- runif(200, 1, 1000)
g$nodes$z <- runif(200, 1, 1000)

graph(g)
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