Organic layout improvement for group nodes

Question

I have a graph with group nodes and most of them contain only simple disconnected nodes. When I do organic layouting (natural clustering off, allowing or disallowing overlapping nodes and node/edge overlaps does not improve the results) the isolated nodes inside group nodes are layed out, but in inoptimal way. I would expect something like packed circle to minimize the size of the node, instead they are scattered within the group node in an 'organic' way.

This behavour doesn't contribute to the readability of the graph. It would be nice if there would be an option to specify parameters for the "components layout" that would be recursively  (bottom-up) applied to each group node to optimize its shape.

Answer 1

For arranging isolated nodes in groups in a more organized fashion, you can try a hierarchical layout with Compact Groups (Grouping > Horizontal Group Compaction) or a circular layout with Custom Groups (General > Layout Style).

Then, the groups themselves can be arranged with either the component layout or the organic layout with fixed group conents (Grouping > Group Layout Policy).

 

Comments

Thanks for the suggestion.
Hierarchical layout AFAIU assumes the rectangular shaped group nodes and lays out their child nodes accordingly, whereas in my case the group nodes are elliptically shaped.
The circular layout should, in principle, provide what I want, but I don't understand why 'disk' layout doesn't put my isolated nodes into the interior of the disk, only to its boundary (and how it is then different from the circular) and why in 'organic disk' layout the interior of the disk is only sparsely filled.

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That's correct, the hierarchical algorithm assumes that groups have a rectangular shape.

I can reproduce the odd behavior for 'disk' and 'organic disk' with 'custom groups' and created an internal error report for this. At the moment, I cannot tell what's going wrong.

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Tested circular layout in 3.9, the error with disk/organic disk is still there. It looks like disk = circle and organic disk differs only by putting one node somewhere in the center of the nodes circle.