[antlr-interest] Using ANTLRWorks DOT Output

[Randall R Schulz]

Hi,

This is probably for Jean Bovet to answer, but if anyone else knows, 
please chime in.

I have discovered a rule in my grammar whose DFA is immense (owing, I 
think, to a grammar that is specified very minimally leading to a lot 
of ambiguity and my current laziness in just turning on backtracking).

Visualizing the DFA within ANTLRWorks is not too helpful because even 
when the zoom is lowered as much as possible while still being able to 
read the labels, only a fraction of the graph is visible (and I have a 
1600x1200 monitor!).

So I thought I'd start working with the DOT file that ANTLRWorks allows 
you to save. However, I find that when I use the "dot" command to 
render it, it doesn't look like the graph displayed within ANTLRWorks. 
In particular, I notice that the arcs have no arrows and the fonts are 
different.

So the question is, what "dot" options does ANTLRWorks use to render the 
graphs it generates?

Curiously, I thought I'd figure this out myself,and wrote a little 
intermediary shell script to intercept ANTLRWorks' invocations of dot 
and capture the arguments it uses to a log file (and then invoke dot as 
instructed by ANTLRWorks). When I configure ANTLRWorks run this script 
instead of invoke dot directly, the invocations all look like this:

4 arguments:
        "-Tdot"
        "-o"
        "/tmp/GrammarDOTTab50533.out"
        "/tmp/GrammarDOTTab50532.in"


This invocation tells dot to produce DOT-format output. Where / how does 
the image generation happen?


Thanks.


Randall Schulz