I have a 'dependency hell' type situation at work that comes up over and over, and I want a way to generate a plot of the dependency tree, to help humans visualize it.

I can build the dependency tree up manually with my program, which would probably be perl, but I'm trying to find a way to actually generate a plot whether with a perl module, gnuplot, or something i've never heard of. Output format can be svg, png, pdf, whatever.

I looked into the qtree package for \LaTeX, but my \LaTeX skills are not great. The results are pretty however.

It would be extra-cool if the result had collapsible nodes--that you could click to expand...so much so that I considered writing the notes as empty files in nested directories and using a file-browser to visualize them! However, writing empty files just so that I can use a gui file browser for visualization is a bit silly, but that's pretty much what I want.

Any ideas appreciated.

http://www.graphviz.org

In times past, I built quite a complicated Perl program that generated an input-file for this tool, and it worked quite splendidly. The input file describes what the graph is, and the objective of the GraphViz toolset is to determine how best to express it.

Based on my reading of your problem, this is exactly what you need.

I will definitely check that out, but in the meantime I have gotten the \LaTeX qtree package to work, after discovering the 'low-level interface'.

The problem is, my tree data structures always have 3 levels, but can have arbitrarily many branches at each level. This is a problem because the plots run off the paper. The only solution I can think of is to have a 'large' paper size. The largest I have found is \documentclass{a0poster} which fits SOME of my plots. But then the smaller plots contain a lot of 'negative space'.

I think what I really want is NO paper size. I want \LaTeX to render my plot in cyberspace apart from any idea of paper size. Is it possible to do this?