The static approach of representing metabolic pathway diagrams offers no flexibility. Thus, many systems adopt automatic graph layout techniques to visualize the topological architecture of pathways. There are weaknesses, however, because automatically drawn figures are generally difficult to understand. The problem becomes even more serious when we attempt to visualize all of the information in a single, big picture, which usually results in a confusing diagram. To provide a partial solution to this thorny issue, we propose J2dpathway, a metabolic pathway atlas viewer that has node-abstracting features.