Alan Storm is a human being living in Portland, OR by way of Seattle, WA by way of Portland, OR by way of Rochester, NY. He likes making websites, and talks about that here.

He also likes to make things on the web. If you need something made on the web, drop him a line.

We're a little worried about his penchant for slipping into the third person narrative form.

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Aligning .dot Labels

Over the past few years I’ve been making heavy use of DOT, the Directed Graph programming language, using GraphViz for output. It’s basically a text format for building flowchart like diagrams (i.e. directed graphs). It’s a classic computer science thing; “Very Smart, Very Obtuse Syntax”.

I’d been running into a problem where I couldn’t get me labels to correctly left or right align. They’d always appear to align center. Even when I discovered there are three newline characters

1. \n Newline, align center
2. \l Newline, align left
3. \r Newline, align right

I’d still get what looked like centered output. It turns out that, in dot, each line of a label can have a different alignment. So, adding a final \l to my labels fixed things.

NODE [
    label="This is a test \lof creating my lines\lin a non-centeredway\l"
]

I pass this into the internet group mind in the hope it saves someone else some time.