DOT
Generated by scripts/gen-format-pages.py from docs/data/format-metadata/, FILE_FORMATS.csv and docs/formats-master.csv. Do not edit by hand: change the source, then run the script.
Graphviz DOT Preview.
At a glance
| Purpose | A Graphviz DOT file: a text description of a graph's nodes, edges and attributes, which Graphviz lays out and draws. |
| Extensions | .dot |
| Poka parser | poka-graphviz |
| Viewer | poka-text-viewer |
| Depth tier | Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers) |
| Breadth tier | B3 Core (see Breadth tiers) |
How much Poka reads
B3 Core. Only the main content type or types are decoded (for example geometry but not materials, layers or annotations, or only one version family). The list of gaps is substantial.
Confidence: medium (the reviewer read the code). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-26: read parsers/poka-graphviz/src/main.rs (188 lines), plugin.json and poka-viewers' poka-text-viewer, which shows plain text and ignores the language hint. No unit tests or tests/samples.rs, and the corpus has no .dot and .gv sample. Covers .dot and .gv. The source is shown as plain text under a one-line summary (strict, graph or digraph, graph name, edge and subgraph counts). Code wins: the module comment promises a node count, but the code counts only edges and subgraphs. Judgement: B3, because the text is shown in full but the graph, which is what the format describes, is never drawn.
What Poka does not read
- The graph is not laid out or drawn
- No node count, and node and edge attributes are not read
- Edges are counted as every -> or -- in the text outside comments, including inside quoted labels (judgement from the code)
- Shown as plain text without syntax highlighting
- The text shown stops at 200,000 characters and files over 32 MiB are cut (both flagged)
- Text that is not UTF-8 is decoded with replacement characters
Libraries
Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.
- pydot (candidate; MIT; Python; https://pypi.org/project/pydot/) — Reads DOT via graph_from_dot_file/graph_from_dot_data (pyparsing); v4.0.1, June 2025.
- graphviz-rust (candidate; MIT (GitHub page), crates.io lists non-standard for latest 0.9.9, so unconfirmed; Rust; https://github.com/besok/graphviz-rust) — parse() turns DOT source into a Graph; also prints DOT and can invoke Graphviz.
- gonum graph/formats/dot (candidate; BSD-3-Clause (pkg.go.dev module licence, README also cites CC0/Gonum licence); Go; https://pkg.go.dev/gonum.org/v1/gonum/graph/formats/dot) — Parser for Graphviz DOT returning an AST.
- dot-parser (reference; GPL-2.0-or-later; Rust; https://codeberg.org/bromind/dot-parser) — copyleft; Grammar-faithful DOT parser; v0.6.1 (January 2026); copyleft licence limits reuse.
Sources
- parsers/poka-graphviz/src/main.rs
- parsers/poka-graphviz/plugin.json