From dougo Sun Oct 15 15:39:22 1995
To: demeter, com3360, ccs.courses.com3360
Subject: drawing class graphs with xcddraw

Does anyone have any general strategies or hints as to how to lay out
a class graph with xcddraw so that it doesn't look like spaghetti?
E.g. is it better to put the root of the graph in a corner or in the
middle?  Where should objects that are common parts (like a Bool
class) be placed?  ...etc.  Every time I lay out my class graph I have
lines going everywhere, crossing each other and making it very
confusing, and no matter how I move things around it's still a mess.

Maybe someone should write a program to automatically lay out a class
graph in a readable manner.  In Demeter, of course...

Thanks for any advice,
--Doug Orleans
dougo@ccs.neu.edu

==========================================================
From dougo Tue Oct 17 02:17:11 1995
To: "Pablo J. Tejeda-Zeron" <ptejeda>
Cc: com3360, ccs.courses.com3360
Subject: Re: drawing class graphs with xcddraw
Status: R

Pablo J. Tejeda-Zeron writes:
 >   You can duplicate icons. If several icons represent the same figure and have
 >  the same name, xcddraw recognizes them as the same figure, so you don't have
 > to produce that spaghetti.

Thanks, this works great!  I re-did my graph as a tree, with the root
at the upper-left corner and each level of the tree being one level
down the page; for edges that led to vertices that were higher up in
the tree, I just made new "reference" icons below instead.  Much cleaner!

--Doug O.
dougo@ccs.neu.edu