In your shoes I would start with gnuplot. It is very easy for Perl to produce an output data set which gnuplot can use (a CSV of rows of x,y will be fine) and it will happily plot a sequence of disconnected points. There are a bunch of Perl modules to incorporate the plotting into your script if that is a requirement. If you subsequently want something a bit prettier (subjective) then you can look at other options.

I'll check out gnuplot. The only problem with using a text-coordinate file is that I'm likely to have hundreds of thousands of points. Gonna be a big file :)

I'm absolutely not an expert, but I recently used GD and it offers $image->setPixel($x,$y,$color) that seems what you are looking for.

I had not good experience in the past with Image::Magick because was nearly impossible to install correctly under windows, so I cant say anything about it.

Being a GUI programmer (not a professional, only sometimes) I have always the temptetion to use Prima: it ships with Prima::Drawable which has the pixel method. See a huge, recent guide by the author at prima.eu.org. This project wa connected (same author, same site) with the IPA - Image Processing Algorithms you can find interesting.

I will be glad to see your progresses so, if you have the time, please share them :)

L*

I noticed that GD has "setpixel". When I was SVG hacking I just made a big-enough "canvas" and it all worked fine, I was thinking I could do that same with GD: give it, say, a 1000x1000 canvas and then use setPixel to do the "drawing" Thanks!

tens of thousand of points to plot

That probably calls for raster/pixel graphics?

In which case you start with a PNG image, and throw points at it. There is no limit to the number of points you can draw. It's easy to do it from scratch using, say, GD. Perhaps it can support opacity, antialiasing etc. to make it look nice.

However, if you need to draw axes, labels+legends+fonts and support scaling+rotation+viewports then you need something higher level. gnuplot saved me lots of times but it has its limitations. There is also R which is state-of-the-art but put your boots on because there is a steep slope to climb and its Perl integration is minimal. But it's completely script-driven so you can create the R scripts from Perl and system() them out.

bw, bliako

I'd be very surprised if it didn't offer filled circles with small radius.

edit

it does https://www.w3schools.com/graphics/svg_circle.asp

Not at all -- I only mentioned that I have *used* SVG before and it doesn't seem really suitable for separated points and I'm wondering which better graphics package would make sense