GraphViz and LaTeX; gives blank PDF

Question

I've tried 4 different .sty files (most of which didn't work, some of which gave me errors on rendered page).

Now trying with the dot2texi package, which is giving me a blank PDF.

I have tried running initexmf --edit-config-file=pdftex.ini then adding: EnableWrite18=t to opened file, and I've tried adding -shell-escape to the run command:

Yet nothing has worked. How can I write and successfully compile inline GraphViz diagrams in LaTeX?

Answer 1

IMHO the problem does not rely on MiKTeX, but in the required programs that dot2texi relies on. The package has the following dependencies:

• GraphViz - A graph visualization software.
• dot2tex - A tool for converting graphs generated by GraphViz to formats suitable for use with LaTeX.

The first one is an easy-to-deploy .msi file - just double-click and install it in Windows. If I'm not mistaken, GraphViz even adds itself to the system path. You can check if the GraphViz tools are available by running dot --help in the command prompt:

If you get a similar output, GraphViz is added to the system path.

Now, the second tool - dot2tex - is quite tricky for the average Windows user. This tool is actually a Python script and, well, relies on Python to run. Note that the script runs only in the 2.x series (I have Python 3.x in my development Windows machine and had to downgrade it in order to test the script). If you have Python 2.x installed, I recommend you to use easy_install or pip to install dot2tex. Besides of installing it, make sure to include the PYTHON_INSTALL/Scripts directory to your system path in order to make the script available.

I have another option, in case you are not familiar with Python. I built an wrapper from the dot2tex sources and generated a standalone batteries-included dot2tex.exe file, available here. Unzip it and put dot2tex.exe somewhere in your computer. Make sure that the directory where dot2tex.exe rests is also in the system path. Testing dot2tex --help in the command prompt:

With GraphViz and dot2tex available in the system path, let's see this example from the package documentation:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{dot2texi}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{shapes,arrows}
\begin{document}
\begin{dot2tex}[neato,mathmode]
digraph G {
node [shape="circle"];
a_1 -> a_2 -> a_3 -> a_4 -> a_1;
}
\end{dot2tex}
\end{document}

By running pdflatex --shell-escape myfile.tex, we have the correct output:

The important parts from the .log file:

...
Package dot2texi Info: Automatically converting dot/neato files on input line 1
48.
...
\openout3 = `teste148-dot2tex-fig1.dot'.

 Opening dot2tex stream teste148-dot2tex-fig1.dot
runsystem(dot2tex --figonly -ftikz      --prog=neato -tmath  -o teste148-dot2te
x-fig1.tex  teste148-dot2tex-fig1.dot)...executed.

Package dot2texo Info: teste148-dot2tex-fig1.dot converted on input line 11.
...

Hope it helps. :)