<html><head><meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark"></head><body><pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">% Copyright 2010-2019 by RenÃ©e Ahrens
% Copyright 2010-2019 by Olof Frahm
% Copyright 2010-2019 by Jens Kluttig
% Copyright 2010-2019 by Matthias Schulz
% Copyright 2010-2019 by Stephan Schuster
% Copyright 2019 by Jannis Pohlmann
% Copyright 2019 by Till Tantau
%
% This file may be distributed and/or modified
%
% 1. under the LaTeX Project Public License and/or
% 2. under the GNU Free Documentation License.
%
% See the file doc/generic/pgf/licenses/LICENSE for more details.


\section{The Binding Layer}
\label{section-gd-binding-layer}

\ifluatex
\else
    This section of the manual can only be typeset using Lua\TeX.
    \expandafter\endinput
\fi


\subsection{Overview}

This section explains how the \emph{binding} of the graph drawing system to a
particular display layer works. Let me stress that all of this is important
only for readers who
%
\begin{itemize}
    \item either wish to write new display system (see
        Section~\ref{section-gd-display-layer})
    \item or wish to know more about how the graph drawing system works on the
        pure \pgfname\ layer (this is were the binding occurs).
\end{itemize}

\emph{Bindings} are used to encapsulate the details of the communication
between the graph drawing system and a display system (see
Section~\ref{section-gd-display-layer} for an introduction to display systems).

Consider a display system that communicates with the graph drawing system. At
some point, the display system would like to run an algorithm to lay out a
graph. To achieve this, it will call different functions from the class
|InterfaceToDisplay| and the effect of this is that a representation of the
to-be-drawn graph is constructed internally and that the appropriate algorithms
are run. All of this is in some sense independent of the actual display system,
the class |InterfaceToDisplay| offers the same standard interface to all
display systems.

At some point, however, the graph drawing system may need to ``talk back'' to
the display system. For instance, once the graph has been laid out, to trigger
the actual rendering of the graph, the graph drawing system must ``tell'' the
display layer where the vertices lie. For some display systems this is easy: if
the display system itself is written in Lua, it could just access the syntactic
digraph directly. However, for systems like \tikzname\ or systems written in
another language, the graph drawing system needs a set of functions that it can
call that will tell the display system what is going on. This is were bindings
come in.

The class |Binding| is an interface that defines numerous methods that will be
called by the graph drawing system in different situations (see the
documentation below for details). For instance, there is a function
|renderVertex| that is called by the graph drawing system whenever a vertex
should be rendered by the display system. The class is really just an interface
in the sense of object-oriented programming. For each display system you need
to create a subclass of |Binding| like |BindingToPGF| or |BindingToASCII| that
implement the methods declared by |Binding|. The number of methods that need to
be implemented depends on the display system.

In the following, you will find the documentation of the |Binding| class in
Section~\ref{section-gd-binding-doc}. Following this, we first have a quick
look at how the |BindingToPGF| works and then go over a simple example of a
binding to a more or less imaginary display system. This example should help
readers interested in implementing their own bindings.


\subsection{The Binding Class and the Interface Core}
\label{section-gd-binding-doc}

\includeluadocumentationof{pgf.gd.bindings.Binding}
\includeluadocumentationof{pgf.gd.interface.InterfaceCore}


\subsection{The Binding To PGF}

\includeluadocumentationof{pgf.gd.bindings.BindingToPGF}


\subsection{An Example Binding Class}

\label{section-gd-binding-layer-example}

In the present section a complete binding is presented to an imaginary
``\textsc{ascii} art display system'' is presented. The idea is that this
display system will depict graphs using just normal letters and spaces so that,
when the text is typeset in a monospace font, a visualization of the graph
results. For instance:

\bigskip
\noindent
\begin{minipage}[t]{.5\textwidth}
\emph{Graph rendered by |BindingToPGF|:}
\medskip

\tikz [anchor=base]\graph [layered layout,level distance=2.35cm,sibling
distance=1.2cm,edges={rounded corners,&gt;={Stealth[round,sep]}}] {
  Alice;
  Bob;
  Charly;
  Dave;
  Eve;
  Fritz;
  George;
  Alice -&gt; Bob;
  Alice -&gt; Charly;
  Charly -&gt; Dave;
  Bob -&gt; Dave;
  Dave -&gt; Eve;
  Eve -&gt; Fritz;
  Fritz -&gt; Alice;
  George -&gt; Eve;
  George -&gt; Fritz;
  Alice -&gt; George;
};
\end{minipage}%
\begin{minipage}[t]{.49\textwidth}
\emph{Graph rendered by |BindingToASCII|:}

\begin{verbatim}
                   Alice
                 .......
               .. .  .  .
            ...  .   .   .
         ...   ..    .    ..
       ..     .      .      .
  Charly    Bob      .       .
      ..     .       .       .
        .    .       .       .
         .   .       .       .
          .. .       .       .
            ..       .       .
           Dave   George     .
              ..     . ...   .
                .    .    .. .
                 .   .      ...
                  .. .       . ...
                    ..       .    ..
                    Eve      .      ..
                      ..     .     ..
                        .    .    .
                         .   .   .
                          .. . ..
                            ...
                           Fritz
\end{verbatim}
\end{minipage}
\bigskip

The binding will reside in a file |BindingToASCII.lua|, whose contents is
detailed below, and which is used by calling the |bind| function of
|InterfaceToDisplay|, see its documentation for details.

The binding's code starts with some initializations:
%
\begin{codeexample}[code only]
-- File BindingToASCII.lua

-- Imports
local lib = require "pgf.gd.lib"

-- Subclass the Binding class:
local BindingToASCII = lib.class { base_class = require "pgf.gd.bindings.Binding" }
\end{codeexample}

The interesting code is the code for ``rendering'' a graph. The graph drawing
system will invoke the binding's methods |renderStart| and |renderStop| to
signal that the graph drawing algorithms have finished and that the vertices
and edges can now be drawn.

In our \textsc{ascii} renderer, we use a two-dimensional field holding
characters that severs as the ``drawing canvas''. At the beginning of the
rendering, we initialize it with blanks:
%
\begin{codeexample}[code only]
local canvas

function BindingToASCII:renderStart()
  canvas = {}
  -- Clear the canvas
  for x=-30,30 do
    canvas [x] = {}
    for y=-30,30 do
      canvas[x][y] = ' '
    end
  end
end
\end{codeexample}

In order to ``render'' a vertex, the graph drawing system will call the
|renderVertex| method. The binding of \tikzname\ does a lot of complicated
things in this method to retrieve the underlying node's box from internal table
and to somehow reinstall the box in \TeX's output stream; for our
\textsc{ascii} binding things are much simpler: We simply put the vertex's name
at the canvas position corresponding to the vertex's |pos| coordinate. Note
that this simple version of an \textsc{ascii} renderer does not try to scale
things; thus, array out of bounds might occur here.
%
\begin{codeexample}[code only]
function BindingToASCII:renderVertex(v)
  canvas [math.floor(v.pos.x)][math.floor(v.pos.y)] = v.name
end
\end{codeexample}

The rendering of edges is a more complicated process. Given two vertices, we
put dots at the canvas positions between them; provided there are no vertices
(so edges are behind the nodes). Here is the essential part of the code (for
the complete code, have a look at |pgf/gd/examples/BindingToASCII.lua|):
%
\begin{codeexample}[code only]
function BindingToASCII:renderEdge(e)
  local function connect (p,q)
    -- Connect the points p and q
    local x1, y1, x2, y2 = math.floor(p.x+0.5), math.floor(p.y+0.5), math.floor(q.x+0.5), math.floor(q.y+0.5)
    ...
    local delta_x = x2-x1
    local delta_y = y2-y1
    ...
      local slope = delta_y/delta_x
      for i=x1,x2 do
        local x,y = i, math.floor(y1 + (i-x1)*slope + 0.5)

        if canvas[x][y] == " " then
          canvas[x][y] = '.'
        end
      end
    ...
  end

  -- Iterate over all points on the path from tail to head:
  local p = e.tail.pos
  for i=1,#e.path do
    connect(p, e.tail.pos + e.path[i])
    p = e.tail.pos + e.path[i]
  end
  connect(p, e.head.pos)
end
\end{codeexample}

The methods |renderVertex| and |renderEdge| will be called once for each vertex
and edge of the to-be-rendered graph. At the end, the |renderStop| method is
called. In our case, this method will output the canvas using |print|. A slight
complication arises when node names are longer than just one character. In this
case, the following code ``centers'' them on their coordinate and makes sure
that they do not get overwritten by the dots forming edges:
%
\begin{codeexample}[code only]
function BindingToASCII:renderStop()
  for y=10,-30,-1 do
    local t = {}
    for x=-30,30 do
      local s = canvas[x][y]
      for i=1,#s do
        pos = x+30+i-math.floor(#s/2)
        if not t[pos] or t[pos] == " " or t[pos] == "." then
          t[pos] = string.sub(s,i,i)
        end
      end
    end
    print(table.concat(t))
  end
end
\end{codeexample}

At the end, we need to return the created object:
%
\begin{codeexample}[code only]
return BindingToASCII
\end{codeexample}
</pre></body></html>