State of the Ch(art) in Perl

doc_faustroll has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: State of the Ch(art) in Perl by Utilitarian (Vicar) on Jan 22, 2010 at 22:24 UTC
Hi faustroll, I find GD::Graph to be excellent, it took a little while to get the hang of initially, I was using Perl to build data sets, write gnuplot directive files and call gnuplot until I got comfortable with it. Would strongly recommend `print "Good ",qw(night morning afternoon evening)[(localtime)[2]/6]," fellow monks."`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: State of the Ch(art) in Perl by molecules (Monk) on Jan 22, 2010 at 23:32 UTC
I have been very impressed with ChartDirector, even though it costs $99. I'm trying to get my boss to pay for it. I've been using a trial version and am pleased with the results. I've also seen that they have great customer support. I've also checked into a couple of very good Open Source modules: SVG::TT::Graph Changing the symbols is easy (for me anyway) Modifying the spacing between data points is very difficult (i.e. not starting our data directly on the y axis) This also outputs text as text elements, thus allowing me to generate PDFs generated from it in which the text is searchable. Chart::Clicker Modifying the spacing between data points is easy (i.e. not starting our data directly on the y axis) Changing the symbols is extremely difficult. Text is output as drawing commands. PDFs generated from the output will not have searchable text. Hope this helps! UPDATE: ChartDirector works great for raster (e.g. PNG) or for SVG (i.e. vector) graphics. I'm specifically working with SVG files. To output SVG using ChartDirector call the method `enableVectorOutput()` after creating the chart object, then use a file name ending in '.svg' when you output the file: `$chart_obj->enableVectorOutput(); . . . $chart_obj->makeChart('chart.svg');` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: State of the Ch(art) in Perl by zentara (Archbishop) on Jan 23, 2010 at 11:53 UTC
I like to use the flexibilty of the various canvas widgets, to make custom graphs. See Tk Realtime data aquisition or Goo::Canvas Graphing demo or SuperFormula with gnuplot and Tk for examples. It is much more labor intensive to setup, but for certain applications, it beats the graphing code that comes pre-boxed for you. Gnuplot and PGPlot are very good, if you want to learn their methods. I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Old Perl Programmer Haiku	[reply]
Re: State of the Ch(art) in Perl by molecules (Monk) on Jan 23, 2010 at 12:13 UTC
There are a few more suggestions at Really slick Charts and Graphs and at Better plotting than GD::Graph?	[reply]
Re: State of the Ch(art) in Perl by mw487 (Sexton) on Jan 23, 2010 at 11:37 UTC
I am going to go against the flow here and point out that Spreadsheet::WriteExcel recently added initial support for charting (Gnumeric and OpenOffice.org compatible). While I know that Excel charting itself is quite primitive, it does have the advantage of being commonly available, so your chart users can build on your efforts. "The Spreadsheet::WriteExcel Perl module can be used to create a cross-platform Excel binary file. Multiple worksheets can be added to a workbook and formatting can be applied to cells. Text, numbers, formulas, hyperlinks, images and charts can be written to the cells. The file produced by this module is compatible with Excel 97, 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007. The module will work on the majority of Windows, UNIX and Mac platforms. Generated files are also compatible with the Linux/UNIX spreadsheet applications Gnumeric and OpenOffice.org."	[reply]
Re: State of the Ch(art) in Perl by $self (Friar) on Jan 23, 2010 at 09:48 UTC
I am also a happy user of GD::Graph - except when it comes to adding text: the anti-aliasing never really seems to work out very well. The next time I need some graphs I'm planning to check out Imager, which looks very promising.	[reply]
Re: State of the Ch(art) in Perl by ambrus (Abbot) on Jan 23, 2010 at 18:06 UTC
There's also gnuplot.	[reply]
Re: State of the Ch(art) in Perl by jmcnamara (Monsignor) on Jan 24, 2010 at 19:29 UTC
Chart::Clicker produces beautiful charts. See the examples in the documentation and also this presentation: Data Visualization with Chart::Clicker. -- John.	[reply]


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