GraphViz dot: Format: “png” not recognized.

As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m a huge fan of GraphViz software suite in general, and the dot tool in particular. It’s super handy for generating graphs and diagrams out of plain text files.

Today though I came across a problem that I haven’t seen before. While trying to generate an updated PNG graph from a dot file that used to work just fine before, I got the following:

$ dot -Tpng source.dot -o destination.png 
Format: "png" not recognized. Use one of: canon cmap cmapx cmapx_np dot dot_json eps fig gv imap imap_np ismap json json0 mp pic plain plain-ext pov ps ps2 svg svgz tk vdx vml vmlz xdot xdot1.2 xdot1.4 xdot_json

That looks weird. I tried the same with a few other formats and none of them were working. A quick Google search around found the solution over at StackOverflow. All I had to do was:

$ sudo dot -c

After that, dot started working as always.

3 thoughts on “GraphViz dot: Format: “png” not recognized.”


  1. For Windows 10 users trying to debug this same error, launch CMD as administrator (important!) and run dot -c. That fixed the issue for me.

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