my %data = ( first  => 12,
             second => 45,
             third  => 27 );

foreach my $bit ( keys %data ) {
  print "$bit:\t", '-' x $data{$bit}, " $data{$bit}\n";
}
[download]

first:  ------------ 12
second: --------------------------------------------- 45
third:  --------------------------- 27
[download]

Of course if you use s?printf() to format things so that the initial character of your graph lines up correctly it's a bit "pertyer".

...
printf "%8s:\t%s %2d\n", $bit, "-" x $data{$bit}, $data{$bit};
...
[download]

Update: And of course you can get even fancier by making your graph lines a fixed width (say 50 characters) and mapping that into marks and spaces so that the actual values are lined up nicely as well.

...
my $marks = "-" x int( (  $data{ $bit } / MAXDATA ) * 50.0 ); 
my $blanks = " " x ( 50 - $data );
printf "%8s:\t%s%s %2d\n", $bit, $marks, $blanks, $data{ $bit };
[download]

But if we are getting fussy then we can't assume that the keys in the hash are less than eight letters long (or that tabs are 8 chars). With this assumption we'll lose alignment for large keys:

small:   ----- 5
really big key: -------- 8
[download]

I see that you reduce the keys to 8 chars, but this may not work for keys such as "TotalSales2003", "TotalSales2004" etc. This is why I hate 'pertyness', there is always something to break it...

--tidiness is the memory loss of environmental mnemonics

So the priority is on making it bone-simple and quick to incorporate presentation and style changes.

I would also recommend HTML, using the minimum of machine-generated graphics. PDF is *usually* too cumbersome to author and revise. SVG is worse, but only because it's so nascent that the available tools are weak. I wouldn't rule them out, except that they also raise the complexity of ensuring your audience is configured to view them properly. Everyone can view paper, and everyone who is anyone can view HTML.

In those cases where the machine-generated graphics are important, use the method which takes tabular data and creates the basic plots as distinct graphics files. In a quickly configurable way, if you have too many middle-managers.

On my opinion, if you publish a report, just use plain HTML if you are just concerned with showing bars or histograms. If you need to show pie charts or complex charts, you can use GD or Chart to format them and show them through your pages.

From those pages, include a link that allows them to download such report in pure text (then include the previous suggestion of using ASCII art) or in PDF.

To use R within a perl program, you could try Statistics::R. I have not tried this module yet.

PGPLOT is probably the best package available for drawing graphs, but may be too difficult for you on NT. PGPLOT supports many output formats, both vector and bitmap.

To use PGPLOT within a perl program, use PGPLOT. This module has worked for me.