A tailorable and extensible automatic layout facility

An automatic layout facility is a tool that receives as input a graph-like structure and is able to produce a diagram that nicely represents such a structure. Due to the increasing number of systems that manage diagrams, the automatic layout facilities and the algorithms for graphs layout have been extensively studied. The authors present a new approach in building an automatic layout facility. The approach is based on a modular management of a collection of algorithms and on a tool that is able to `synthesize´ the best algorithm for a given application. Such an approach has been used for devising the automatic layout facility of Diagram Server, a network server that offers to its clients an effective set of facilities for managing diagrams