I am not sure why you think the "length" edge attribute is used for
anything. It is not, AFAIK.

G.


On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 6:05 PM, aschmid1 <[email protected]> wrote:

> Tamas,
> Thank you. I suspected I wanted too much from igraph. Indeed one cannot
> draw say a triangle with arbitrary edge lengths... But then I have a naive
> question (I'm new to graphs): how the edge attribute "length" may be used
> (providing there is also attribute "weight")?
> Best, Alec
>
>
> On 03/09/2014 3:32 PM, Tamás Nepusz wrote:
>
>> I thought that the commands
>>> gm<-set.edge.attribute(gm, "weight", index=E(gm), value=weights)
>>> gm<-set.edge.attribute(gm, "length", index=E(gm), value=weights)
>>> ensure that plot(gm) yields the edge lengths corresponding to the values
>>> of vector weights.
>>>
>> No, it doesn't. *Some* layout algorithms *might* take into account the
>> weights of the edges to *some* extent (i.e. they would *try* to ensure
>> that edges with larger weights end up being shorter than edges with
>> smaller weights), but there is no layout algorithm that would
>> guarantee that the lengths you specify are satisfied exactly. The main
>> reason is that most of the length combinations are impossible to
>> satisfy in the 2D plane; for instance, it is impossible to plot a full
>> graph of size 4 if we want every single edge to be of length 1 (and
>> there are infinitely many examples for this).
>>
>> As far as I know, the Fruchterman-Reingold layout algorithm (see
>> layout.fruchterman.reingold) is the only one in igraph that supports
>> weights; see http://igraph.sourceforge.net/doc/R/layout.html . But
>> even for the Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm, the only thing that the
>> weights do is that they make the attraction forces between the
>> endpoints of the edges proportional to the weight of the edge.
>>
>> --
>> T.
>>
>
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