Drawing dynamic graphs (orthogonally)

Question

I have graph composed of a set of nodes at a given instant in time. This graph may evolve through time, i.e. the relationships between the nodes and the nodes themselves may change.
The drawing has to be an orthogonal one.

I'd like to draw the evolution of the graph, i.e. draw the image of the graph at the different instants, trying to have similar drawings from an instant to the next one.
I've been told that many graph layout algorithms return very different results just adding one node, and I'd like to avoid this, as I need similar drawings for similar graphs.

I'm looking for algorithms and libraries that can help building my evolutionary drawing (the language for my current project is Java)

Answer 1

You could run the algorithm each time with all nodes (past, present, future shown), and just hide the ones that are not extant at the particular instant.

GraphViz and other graph layout tools usually allow node and edge formats set to hide or invisible.