Program for working with DFA/NFA/PDA?

Question

I'm looking for a program or utility to help construct DFA/NFA/PDA etc. and the like.

The main reason I'm interested in this, is because I want to be able to move the various states around without breaking their component connections, or having to redraw all the connections to their new place (otherwise I'd be doing this by hand! :P )

Please let me know if there's a better SE site for this.

Answer 1

JFlap is a pretty useful tool.

I have also used Grapher which may be downloaded from here:

http://www.ii.pw.edu.pl/~ratajcza/csm/grapher/grapher.html

Answer 2

• If you want to construct and test and play with your automata, you might find JFlap usefull.

• If you want to produce images and are familiar with LaTeX then TikZ is great (TikZ automata examples)

• If you want to produce images maybe a vector drawing tool like Inkscape

Answer 3

Have a look into the dot file format. It is a quasi-standard for graph descriptions. Once you have written down your graph, you can generate an SVG from it using e.g. graphviz and edit the result in Inkscape.

Answer 4

If I were attempting to draw a DFA or NFA, I would probably use Graphviz.

Answer 5

If you already have access to Mathematica, you can also use it to make images of DFAs. The recent versions have the ability to draw graphs.