I think you will need some kind of property to store the vertex names from Graphviz; you might be able to use null_property_map for that (from <boost/graph/property_maps/null_property_map.hpp>) though.
-- Jeremiah Willcock
The following works, but it seems very confusing. I tried the two commented lines separately but they don't compile. Is this the recommended method? typedef boost::property < boost::vertex_name_t, std::string> VertexProperty; typedef boost::adjacency_list < boost::vecS, boost::vecS, boost::directedS, VertexProperty> graph_t; //typedef boost::adjacency_list < boost::vecS, boost::vecS, boost::directedS, boost::no_property> graph_t; //typedef boost::adjacency_list < boost::vecS, boost::vecS, boost::directedS, boost::null_property_map> graph_t; graph_t graph; boost::dynamic_properties dp; boost::property_map<graph_t, boost::vertex_name_t>::type name = get(boost::vertex_name, graph); dp.property("node_id",name); bool status = boost::read_graphviz(stream,graph,dp,"node_id"); David