Displaying networkx graph with labels

Networkx has a number of functions to draw graphs but also allow the user fine control over the whole process.

draw is basic and its docstring specifically mentions:

Draw the graph as a simple representation with no nodeabels or edge labels and using the full Matplotlib figure areas labels by default. See draw_networkx() for more fatured drawing that allows title, axis labels

The functions prefixed by draw_networkx followed by edges, nodes, edge_labels and edge_nodes allow finer control over the whole drawing process.

Your example worked fine when using draw_networkx.

In addition, if you are looking for an output that resembles an organogram, I would suggest the use of graphviz through networkx. Graphviz's dot is ideal for this kind of diagrams (please also see this for dot).

In what follows, I have tried to modify your code slightly to demonstrate the use of both functions:

import networkx as nx import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import pandas #Build the dataset df = pandas.DataFrame({'emp_name':pandas.Series(['Marianne Becker', 'Evan Abbott', 'Jay Page', 'Seth Reese', 'Maxine Collier'], index=[0,1,2,3,4]), 'mgr_name':pandas.Series(['None', 'Marianne Becker', 'Marianne Becker', 'Marianne Becker', 'Marianne Becker'], index = [0,1,2,3,4])}) #Build the graph G=nx.DiGraph() G.add_nodes_from(df.emp_name) G.nodes() G.add_node('None') # #Over here, you are manually adding 'None' but in reality #your nodes are the unique entries of the concatenated #columns, i.e. emp_name, mgr_name. You could achieve this by #doing something like # #G.add_nodes_from(list(set(list(D.emp_name.values) + list(D.mgr_name.values)))) # # Which does exactly that, retrieves the contents of the two columns #concatenates them and then selects the unique names by turning the #combined list into a set. #Add edges subset = df[['mgr_name','emp_name']] tuples = [tuple(x) for x in subset.values] G.add_edges_from(tuples) G.number_of_edges() #Perform Graph Drawing #A star network (sort of) nx.draw_networkx(G) plt.show() t = raw_input() #A tree network (sort of) nx.draw_graphviz(G, prog = 'dot') plt.show() 

You could also try using graphviz's dot from the command line directly, by saving your networkx network via nx.write_dot. To do this:

From within your python script:

nx.write_dot(G, 'test.dot') 

After this, from your (linux) command line and assuming that you have graphviz installed:

dot test.dot -Tpng>test_output.png feh test_output.png #Feh is just an image viewer. firefox test_output.png & #In case you don't have feh installed. 

For a more typical organogram format, you can force orthogonal edge routing by

dot test.dot -Tpng -Gsplines=ortho>test_output.png 

Finally, here are the outputs

Output of draw_networkx

Output of draw_graphviz

Output of dot without orthogonal edges

Output of dot with orthogonal edges

Hope this helps.