Introduction

Overview

twyg lets you visualise arbitrary tree structures in a pretty way. The appearance of the tree (layout, color, node, connection shapes etc.) is fully controlled via configuration files in a generative way. This means that almost all visual properties of the output can be controlled by expressions that depend on the characteristics of the tree (e.g. the color or shape of a node can be a function of its hierarchical position in the tree). This allows for crafting very flexible configurations that can be applied to trees of arbitrary size and complexity.

Plain-text JSON files describing the tree are expected as input. These JSON files only contain the topology of the tree and the text labels of the individual tree nodes. They do not contain any information on how the tree should be visually rendered; this is entirely described by the configurations. The benefit of separating the visual style from the tree data itself—in a way similar to separating style from content in the case of CSS and HTML—is that this way one can easily render the same tree in different visual styles by just applying different configurations to it.

twyg comes with an extensive set of default configurations and colorschemes to get you started. This way, you can get usable results quickly by just combining the included configuration and colorschemes, then gradually learn the intricacies of the configuration language to create your own custom visual styles. Moreover, you can combine both the built-in and your own configurations in a cascading fashion (akin to CSS) to build up your own library of custom styles.

Features

• Compatible with Python 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7
• Supports the Cairo and NodeBox1 rendering backends
• 16 visually fine-tuned built-in configurations
• 32 attractive looking colorschemes
• Simple JSON files as input
• PNG, PDF, SVG and PostScript output using the Cairo backend
• Fully customisable node and connection shapes and coloring algorithms
• High-quality font rendering via Cairo
• Gradient and drop shadow support, even in PDF and PostScript files
• Custom human-readable configuration language that allows the visual properties of the tree to be defined as expressions of arbitraty complexity
• Ability to cascade configurations and configuration sections
• Full CSS3 color notation and SVG 1.0 color keyword name support
• Extensive reference documentation