.. _drawing:

Drawing

NetworkX provides basic functionality for visualizing graphs, but its main goal is to enable graph analysis rather than perform graph visualization. In the future, graph visualization functionality may be removed from NetworkX or only available as an add-on package.

Proper graph visualization is hard, and we highly recommend that people visualize their graphs with tools dedicated to that task. Notable examples of dedicated and fully-featured graph visualization tools are Cytoscape <http://www.cytoscape.org/>, Gephi <https://gephi.org/>, Graphviz <http://www.graphviz.org/>, iplotx <https://iplotx.readthedocs.io/> and, for LaTeX <http://www.latex-project.org/>_ typesetting, PGF/TikZ <https://github.com/pgf-tikz/pgf/>_. To use these and other such tools, you should export your NetworkX graph into a format that can be read by those tools. For example, Cytoscape can read the GraphML format, and so, networkx.write_graphml(G, path) might be an appropriate choice.

.. tip::

iplotx accepts NetworkX native data structures without exporting to a file. An example is provided below.

More information on the features provided here are available at

matplotlib: http://matplotlib.org/
pygraphviz: http://pygraphviz.github.io/
iplotx: https://iplotx.readthedocs.io/

Matplotlib

.. automodule:: networkx.drawing.nx_pylab .. autosummary:: :toctree: generated/

display apply_matplotlib_colors draw draw_networkx draw_networkx_nodes draw_networkx_edges draw_networkx_labels draw_networkx_edge_labels draw_bipartite draw_circular draw_kamada_kawai draw_planar draw_random draw_spectral draw_spring draw_shell

Matplotlib with iplotx

Draw networks with matplotlib, using iplotx for extended styling options.

Examples

.. code-block:: python

import iplotx as ipx G = nx.cycle_graph(5, create_using=nx.DiGraph) layout = nx.circular_layout(G) ipx.network(G, layout=layout, vertex_facecolor=["tomato", "gold"])

Graphviz AGraph (dot)

.. automodule:: networkx.drawing.nx_agraph .. autosummary:: :toctree: generated/

from_agraph to_agraph write_dot read_dot graphviz_layout pygraphviz_layout

Graphviz with pydot

.. automodule:: networkx.drawing.nx_pydot .. autosummary:: :toctree: generated/

from_pydot to_pydot write_dot read_dot graphviz_layout pydot_layout

Graph Layout

.. automodule:: networkx.drawing.layout .. autosummary:: :toctree: generated/

arf_layout bipartite_layout bfs_layout circular_layout forceatlas2_layout kamada_kawai_layout planar_layout random_layout rescale_layout rescale_layout_dict shell_layout spring_layout spectral_layout spiral_layout multipartite_layout

LaTeX Code

.. automodule:: networkx.drawing.nx_latex .. autosummary:: :toctree: generated/

to_latex_raw to_latex write_latex