Heh heh.

It would probably be helpful to the community if we could add a layout plugin to allow users to specify layouts in some absolute or relative grid format, to avoid all the invisible edge and edge length hackery. We just need appropriate funding.

We have some amazing maintainers who work on gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz now, but the think is, there are far more bug reporters than bug fixers. The first gen of Graphviz authors are timing out, so we very few people are around now to fix relatively deep semantic or logical bugs, c.f. https://xkcd.com/2347/

Best regards, Graphviz the Project