Custom Charts w/ Perl and GD

An anonymous reader writes "This article describes techniques you can use to create new levels of usefulness in your dynamically generated charts with Perl and GD. Cook up some automatically generated graphs for your organizational meetings or live enterprise directory data. Annotate the charts with readable text that delivers more information than the standard pie chart. Using the power of GD and Perl, you can link various data and images together to create sophisticated charts that will help bring visual interest to your applications."

Comments

Re:wow!

[Coryoth]

For those of us who just want to generate some simple graphs for papers and such, what do people use? I've messed with Excel, gnuplot, R, and now I'm using ploticus. Anyone have better solutions? To be honest I would suggest you try messing with Gnuplot some more -- it is actually a lot better, and produces much nicer plots, than it seems at first. The trick is to use a different terminal type than "x11", which is pretty crappy; the output looks remarkably different if you use "png", "svg" or "postscript". Here are some examples of plots I've done with Gnuplot: [1], [2], [3] [4] (for the last link, note that vertical text alignment renders fine in inkscape, just not on Wikipedia -- download the svg file to see).

If that's still not tickling your fancy then I would suggest matplotlib which is actually pretty versatile, and produces good looking plots. There's also PyX if you're looking for slightly more raw graphical interaction with nice output. Truth be told, however, after messing around with many of the same options you have, I've found that Gnuplot, once you get over the initial learning hurdle and figure out how to turn out nice looking plots, is the fastest and easiest way to turn out plots and charts.