[clug] Postscript Graphing Library for programming

[Drew Parsons]

On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 11:41 +1000, Paul Wayper wrote:
> Hi people,
> 
> I thought I'd put out a request to the Lazyweb for information about 
> drawing graphs (bar charts, line charts, etc) in a program (e.g. in 
> Perl) that can be output directly to a printer.  I'm trying to graph 
> information that has a lot more statistical resolution than the 65,536 
> data rows that OpenOffice Calc seems to be limited to.  My current 
> program uses the GD::Graph library, which is fine if you want to output 
> a PNG at a large resolution, load it into GIMP, scale it to the page and 
> print it - because that's the only way I've found so far of actually 
> outputting the graph in anything near the printer's actual resolution 
> (everything else seems to think that 50DPI is fine).  I don't mind if I 
> do the rasterisation inside the program rather than inside the printer 
> driver - so I don't _have_ to output PostScript - but I want something 
> that can take up an entire sheet of A4 at 360DPI or better.
> 
> Any recommendations?
> 

Have you tried grace?  I don't know how many data points it can manage,
but its print dialog has an entry for dpi resolution (default 300).  Has
a choice of a range of graphic output formats, can be scripted (batch
mode).

Drew