my ( $m, %h ) = 0;
while (<DATA>) {
  my ( $k, $v ) = split / /, $_, 2;
  $m = length $k if $m < length $k;
  $h{$k} = $v;
}

for ( sort keys %h ) {
  printf "%${m}s %s\n", $_, 'x' x $h{$_};
}

__DATA__
thisone 3
thatone 1
something 7
else 4

__OUTPUT__
     else xxxx
something xxxxxxx
  thatone x
  thisone xxx
[download]

Thanks, not really the reply I was hoping for (was hoping perl carried a method of making web images internally and that the other libs were just addins to create other types of images or make creation simpler).

In any event, I learned something....

ditto ... for simple bar charts, ... you can do a lot with <div>, playing with background colors, images, nesting them, etc.

use strict;

open (IFILE,"testfile.txt") or die $!;

my %values;
my $maxvalue;

while (<IFILE>)
{
        my ($tag,$value) = split /\s/,$_;
        $values{$tag} = $value;
        if ($value > $maxvalue){$maxvalue = $value}
}

for (my $counter=$maxvalue;$counter>0;$counter--)
{
        foreach (keys %values)
        {
                if ($values{$_} >= $counter)
                {
                        print "#";
                }
                print "\t\t";
        }
        print "\n";
}

foreach (keys %values)
{
        print "$_\t";
        if (length($_) <8){print "\t"}
}
print "\n";
[download]

Note: tabbing of the column labels may be flakey

It just prints a very simple bar chart with # symbols

Update: After the excellent suggestion from TaulMarill of using html tags, you might like to try this alternative version:

use strict;

open (IFILE,"testfile.txt") or die $!;

my %values;
my $maxvalue;

while (<IFILE>)
{
        my ($tag,$value) = split /\s/,$_;
        $values{$tag} = $value;
        if ($value > $maxvalue){$maxvalue = $value}
}
print "<table>";
for (my $counter=$maxvalue;$counter>0;$counter--)
{
        print "<tr>";
        foreach (keys %values)
        {
                if ($values{$_} >= $counter)
                {
                        print "<td bgcolor=\"red\" fontcolor=\"red\"><
+pre> </pre></td>";
                }
                else
                {
                        print "<td></td>";
                }

        }
        print "</tr>";
}
print "<tr>";
foreach (keys %values)
{
        print "<td>$_</td>";
}
print "</tr></table>";
[download]

I think the results look quite nice :-)