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

To visualise some data, I've used GraphViz for a while. GraphViz works great and is easy to use, but it generates rather ugly images. For presentations, anti-aliasing and non-overlapping undirectional graphs are needed. Of course, I could have GraphViz output ps and filter it, or use Image Magick to first scale the image to 800%, then blur and then rescale to 12.5%, but that only takes care of anti-aliassing and I'd like to know if anyone knows a Perl solution to this problem. Are there more modules that do what GraphViz does? Or should we really leave the professional work up to Windows users...? 

2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$

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Re: Better than GraphViz?
by kal (Hermit) on Jan 07, 2002 at 21:47 UTC

    Firstly, scale-blur-scale won't actually anti-alias the picture, although probably will prettyify it to some extent. The best way would be to generate the picture at twice the reoslution (or better) that you finally want, and then just scale down - that will give you a better anti-alias.

    As for replacements - perhaps you can try linking to Guppi? I don't know of any dedicated Perl modules for it, but presumably it's Bonobo/corba-ized, which might help.

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      There seems to be a general misunderstanding about the word "graph". GraphViz doesn't create charts, but graphs.

      A graph is a collection of nodes and edges. (like cities and interconnecting roads).

      2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$

      [download]

[reply]
[d/l]
        Graphviz allows output to SVG format (among others). Which might solve some problems, but create others (e.g., you need an SVG viewer to see the results).
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