What is going wrong in Automatic Layout ?
- The key problem is that Graphviz parents are agoraphobically skewed towards each other, in a way that is visually unexpected, and a source of further problems down-stream.
- The forcing together of parents places pressure, in turn, on enclosed ranges of children, squeezed by cousins on either side.
- In the clash between huddling parents, and enclosed children struggling claustrophobically for space between their cousins, even-numbered ranges of squeezed children introduce spurious asymmetry, while odd-numbered ranges of squeezed children seem to leave symmetry undistorted..
- but even when the diagram is not artificially asymmetric, the squeezing of children between cousins still leaves some (or even all !!) parent-child relationships completely indecipherable.
Solution ? Plain vanilla orthogonal trees, with parents centered over children. Even if this means politely setting Graphviz aside for tree diagrams (with orthogonal connectors), or adding a post-processor to clean up after it.