I've spent a lot of frustrating time trying to find the 'best' way to create pretty graphics from data in my perl programs.

Spent a lot of time with GD.pm, it has a lot of easy-to-use modules built around it, but the graphics are always strongly aliased. There are tricks to lessen the aliasing, but nothing is perfect: Always a lot of hassle, no matter how much tweaking you do.

At one point, I looked at using POV-Ray files. POV-Ray graphing example Generating the text format file in perl, then doing a not-so-quick system call to ask POV-Ray to render the image for me. This was slow and 3-d only works for a limited range of information graphics.

I'm writing this because I'm bursting at the seams with excitement because I HAVE FOUND THE ANSWER: generating SVG files and using ImageMagik to convert those into whatever else you want (png,jpg,pdf,etc). SVG uses XML files and the syntax isn't overly weird. I started out using a WYSIWYG vector graphic program that exports SVG code http://www.sodipodi.com/, then manipulating the code in perl to produce what I was looking for. Mind you, as with most WYSIWYG's, I was able to reduce the auto-generated code by over 80%. But I learn better by having an example and tweaking it.

To introduce you to the joys of this format, if you are unfamiliar with it; here's an example graphic produced by running a perl-generated svg file through convert via a system call: http://www.oakbox.com/svg2png.png

And here is the svg file: http://www.oakbox.com/svg2png.svg.

And I get all this goodness by running
 system(convert svg2png.svg svg2png.png);

So, to sum up:
SVG + ImageMagick = Happiness

oakbox

In reply to Pretty graphics generation by oakbox

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