proofgraph: Dependency Graphs of Results

About

The proofgraph package automatically produces a graph of the dependencies between the results (theorems, lemmas, propositions…) of a mathematical article. Unlike other approaches, it requires no manual annotation: it infers an edge from one result to another whenever the proof of the former refers to the latter through an ordinary cross-reference (\ref, \cref, \autoref…). A manual \uses command is also available for dependencies that are not expressed through a visible reference.

The package writes a Graphviz .dot file describing the graph, which can be rendered with dot (or, with shell-escape enabled, rendered and embedded into the document automatically). It can:

• infer dependencies from cross-references inside proofs, with no annotation;
• capture \ref, cleveref/hyperref variants (\cref, \autoref, \eqref…), manual \uses, and optionally \cite to external work (and, on request, the references made in the statements of the results themselves);
• track proofs written in an environment of your own, not only proof;
• add dependencies on cited work by hand, for a proof that does not cite it visibly or a result stated without a proof;
• remove self-loops, suppress specific (e.g. unwanted forward) citations, and exclude chosen nodes;
• style nodes differently according to the type of result;
• optionally run Graphviz and include the rendered graph automatically.

The documentation of this package is provided in the proofgraph.pdf file, produced from the documented source proofgraph.dtx.

What it looks like

That is the graph of Connecting Knowledge Compilation Classes and Width Parameters (doi:10.1007/s00224-019-09930-2), essentially as published: 62 numbered results drawn from five environments, 24 external works and 114 edges. Beyond loading the package, all it took was switching the cite option on, styling the five kinds of result, keeping one environment out of the graph, and recording by hand, with twelve commands, the dependencies that no visible cross-reference expresses: every other edge, and the numbering of all 62 nodes, was inferred from the cross-references the proofs already contained. The manual, which discusses this example in detail, is where the figure comes from.

Prerequisites

In addition to a working installation of LaTeX2e (October 2020 or later), proofgraph relies on a few other packages, which should be provided by all reasonable LaTeX distributions:

• amsthm
• etoolbox
• xstring
• kvoptions
• graphicx (only to embed the rendered graph in the document with \proofgraph; not needed if you only emit and render the .dot file)
• tikz and hyperref (optional, only to make the embedded graph's nodes clickable hyperlinks to their results; without them the graph is still embedded, just without links)

Rendering the .dot file into an image requires the external Graphviz tool dot. Automatic rendering additionally requires the document to be compiled with shell-escape enabled.

Manual installation

Simply copy the file proofgraph.sty in your LaTeX working directory, or in any other directory where LaTeX searches for packages.

See also

result-graph does for a Lean 4 formalisation what proofgraph does for an article: it draws the dependency graph of the results of a development, deliberately with the same vocabulary, node styles and edge convention, so that the graph of a formalisation and the graph of the paper it formalises look like one family. There the dependencies are not inferred from cross-references but read off the elaborated proof terms, and are therefore exact; and since a whole development is far too large for one figure, it is sliced into a small neighbourhood of each result.

License

Copyright © 2026 by Pierre Senellart.

This work may be distributed and/or modified under the conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3 of this license or (at your option) any later version. The latest version of this license is in http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt and version 1.3 or later is part of all distributions of LaTeX version 2005/12/01 or later.

Contact

https://github.com/PierreSenellart/proofgraph

Pierre Senellart pierre@senellart.com

Bug reports and feature requests should preferably be submitted through the Issues feature of GitHub.