Automatic graph drawing

This paper is devoted to the puzzling problem of automatic drawing of nice graphs. The first part presents a small survey of existing methods to draw graphs following their characteristics: directed graphs or undirected ones, with or without cycles, with or without semantic contents associated to nodes and edges. In the second part, the authors present a software package they have developed to draw general undirected graphs. The program uses simulated annealing to optimise the ‘aesthetic objective function’, biconnex decomposition to enlighten the structure of the graph and a simple original routing method to trace the edges avoiding to cut the nodes boxes.