Glossary · Layouts
Hierarchical Layout
Also known as: Tree Layout.
A top-down (or left-right) layout for trees and acyclic hierarchies that places parent nodes above their children.
A hierarchical layout arranges nodes by depth: the root sits at the top, its children at the next level, and so on. It is the natural choice for organizational charts, file system trees, classification taxonomies, and any strictly acyclic hierarchy.
Hierarchical layouts are simpler and faster than Dagre because they assume a tree shape (or near-tree) and do not need to break cycles. They produce predictable, easy-to-read output that humans interpret instantly.
In TopoKit, the hierarchical layout supports configurable spacing, alignment, and direction, and integrates with the cluster API for multi-department or multi-region trees.
References
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