DOKK / manpages / debian 10 / graphviz / unflatten.1.en
UNFLATTEN(1) General Commands Manual UNFLATTEN(1)

unflatten - adjust directed graphs to improve layout aspect ratio

unflatten [-f] [-llen] [-clen ] [ -o outfile ] [ files ]

unflatten is a preprocessor to dot that is used to improve the aspect ratio of graphs having many leaves or disconnected nodes. The usual layout for such a graph is generally very wide or tall. unflatten inserts invisible edges or adjusts the minlen on edges to improve layout compaction.

The following options are supported:

The minimum length of leaf edges is staggered between 1 and len (a small integer).
Enables the staggering of the -l option to fanout nodes whose indegree and outdegree are both 1. This helps with structures such as a -> {w x y z} -> b. This option only works if the -l flag is set.
Form disconnected nodes into chains of up to len nodes.
causes the output to be written to the specified file; by default, output is written to stdout.

The following operand is supported:

Names of files containing 1 or more graphs in dot format. If no files operand is specified, the standard input will be used.

Stephen C. North <north@research.att.com>
Emden R. Gansner <erg@research.att.com>

gc(1), dot(1), acyclic(1), gvpr(1), gvcolor(1), ccomps(1), tred(1), libgraph(3)

21 January 2001