Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Pan by pressing the right mouse button and dragging
—In many
graphical applications, if you press the right mouse button and then
click and drag, you can easily pan around the scene. This works in
Gephi and yEd. In Cytoscape, the right-click-and-drag action is linked
to zoom.
•
Pan by pressing center mouse button, clicking, and clicking
and dragging
—In Cytoscape and NodeXL, you can press the center
mouse button, click, and then click and drag to pan.
•
Pan using the scrollbars
—If available, you can use scrollbars to pan.
Scaling, translating, and rotating are used to alter node positions. Scaling
can be used to space the nodes closer together or further apart without
changing the line widths, font sizes, node sizes, and so on. This can be
effective if you want to make the graph a bit more dense without having to
increase the size of all the elements separately.
Tip
Zoom and pan are not the same as scale and translate. Zoom and pan
change your viewpoint, while scale and translate change the positions
of nodes.
Scaling, translating, and rotating can be very effective when you are working
with parts of a graph. For some of the examples in this topic, the automatic
layouts left huge gaps between different parts of the graph. You can select
a portion of the graph and drag it closer (that is, translate it), and possibly
add a bit of rotation and scale, to help make the graph more dense while still
preserving the overall layout. Scale, translate, and rotate functionality can
vary widely between software. Chapter 7, “Point-and-Click Graph Tools,”
provides further information on these.
In the market basket analysis, it may be interesting to zoom in on some of
the small components. Using zoom and pan, you can quickly focus on the
little component in the upper-right corner of the graph in
Figure 6-2
, as
shown zoomed in
Figure 6-3
.
