Random order of blocks in diagrams

[antonostrovsky]

First of all, thank you for the great project! I really enjoy using Argdown and have started to use it for documenting Yale Uni lectures: https://github.com/antonostrovsky/open-yale-death-shelly-kagan

One problem that really stops me from creating useful diagrams is that each time I add a new character, the order of blocks on the diagram changes randomly.
Example: https://github.com/antonostrovsky/open-yale-death-shelly-kagan/blob/master/lectures/9.%20Plato%2C%20Part%20IV%2C%20Arguments%20for%20the%20immortality%20of%20the%20soul%20(cont.).ad

Try adding absolutely any character in any place in the document and the parts will randomly re-shuffle in the Viz.JS or Dagre preview.

Is there any way I can enforce the order of the parts (grey background blocks that are created by starting a paragraph with ##)?

Best regards,
Anton

[christianvoigt]

Hi Anton,
We are using the layout algorithms of VizJs (graphviz) and Dagre. Both are using a layer or rank-based hierarchical layout (see here for a short explanation).

take a look at: https://argdown.org/guide/changing-the-graph-layout.html

At the moment Dagre does not offer us many configuration options, but I think you might find the VizJs rank, samerank and newrank options useful, though there is currently no way to change the "sequence" within the same rank/layer (which is what you were looking for).

If you want to have complete control over your graph layout, we recommend to export your graph to graphml and edit it in yEd, a free graph editor with amazing features.

It would be nice to have the option to manually layout the graph directly in VSCode, so if anyone wants to write a custom graph editor for the Argdown extension we would be very happy about that. But it will probably not happen soon.

[antonostrovsky]

To be fair, Viz.JS works incredibly well. This is the grouping that the algorithm offers and I couldn't be happier in this case:
https://github.com/antonostrovsky/open-yale-death-shelly-kagan/raw/master/lectures/17.%20The%20badness%20of%20death%2C%20Part%20II%2C%20The%20deprivation%20account.pdf

[antonostrovsky]

As official Argdown documentation suggests, this question on SO provides a plenty of useful examples of using rank property: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25734244/how-do-i-place-nodes-on-the-same-level-in-dot