Hi guys,

I'm the author of PNGwriter, mentioned above (site). PNGwriter is well-suited for precisely the task you're interested in. However, when you say you need to represent data on a grid, do you mean alter a pixel's colour given each data entry? Or place text (your data) in a grid of lines? In any case, PNGwriter can help you do both, as it lets you alter individual pixel's RGB values (as in BASIC) and also allows you to plot any TrueType font. All you need is libpng, Freetype2 for the text and away you go. If you're interested, I'd be more than willing to answer any questions you may have.

As a side note, a good friend of mine and Perl developer was helping me create a Perl interface for PNGwriter, so all the good Perl folks could access this C++ library straight from Perl code, should they want to. Unfortunately he's been swamped by work (and he's a self-employed programmer/admin, so what he codes is what he eats :-) ) and has been unable to advance this project beyond what I estimate to be the 50-70% mark. We have CPAN namespace approval (did I say that right?) .

Might anyone here be interested in cooperating?

Cheers,

Paul Blackburn