[clug] Postscript Graphing Library for programming

[Tony Breeds]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 11:41:40AM +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?

Well it's not quite the same as GD::Graph.  But for my thesis I used
GNUPlot quite a lot.

You basically spit out one (or more) data files (tab seperated is good).
and a GNUplot control file.  Then run gunplot ${file}.  And mavel in the
glory of postscript.  (you can also generate PNG at the same time if you
want a web version of the output).

Bar graphs are a little more challenging but they can be done.
I've never tried pie charts.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-gnuplot/
is pretty good for starters.

Yours Tony

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