[2509.15834] Automatic layout of railroad diagrams

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Computer Science > Programming Languages

arXiv:2509.15834 (cs)

[Submitted on 19 Sep 2025]

Title:Automatic layout of railroad diagrams

Authors:Shardul Chiplunkar, Clément Pit-Claudel<br>View a PDF of the paper titled Automatic layout of railroad diagrams, by Shardul Chiplunkar and 1 other authors

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Abstract:Railroad diagrams (also called "syntax diagrams") are a common, intuitive visualization of grammars, but limited tooling and a lack of formal attention to their layout mostly confines them to hand-drawn documentation. We present the first formal treatment of railroad diagram layout along with a principled, practical implementation. We characterize the problem as compiling a *diagram language* (specifying conceptual components and how they connect and compose) to a *layout language* (specifying basic graphical shapes and their sizes and positions). We then implement a compiler that performs *line wrapping* to meet a target width, as well as vertical *alignment* and horizontal *justification* per user-specified policies. We frame line wrapping as an optimization problem, where we describe principled dimensions of optimality and implement corresponding heuristics. For front-end evaluation, we show that our diagram language is well-suited for common applications by describing how regular expressions and Backus-Naur form can be compiled to it. For back-end evaluation, we argue that our compiler is practical by comparing its output to diagrams laid out by hand and by other tools.

Comments:<br>24 pages (+2 appendix, +3 references); 22 figures (+4 appendix); 3 tables

Subjects:

Programming Languages (cs.PL)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2509.15834 [cs.PL]

(or<br>arXiv:2509.15834v1 [cs.PL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.15834

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history<br>From: Shardul Chiplunkar [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Fri, 19 Sep 2025 10:13:03 UTC (1,880 KB)

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