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."

wow!

[jdunn14]

With a general purpose language tied to a drawing library I can make custom graphics? Holy crap, who would have thought. 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?

Re:These charts look like shit

[Solra Bizna]

I'm better at making code than graphics [deviantart.com].

Now, if only other people were better at waiting on my every graphical need, free of charge...

-:sigma.SB

So close

[niceone]

Ah, the summary was so close to getting the words 'perl' and 'readable' in the same sentence (possibly for the first time), but just couldn't quite pull it off.

Re:Don't get it..

[Hijacked Public]

I don't know man, they have a donut chart on there with some pretty serious graphics laid into it. That beats most other articles with their plain Jane donut charts, these ones have upper management written all over them.

Maybe they should email a link to Edward Tufte...amybe he'll be insterested. Data graphic geniuses these folks.

Re:So close

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Of course, "readable" was referring to the charts, not the Perl, which, as everyone knows, is write-only.

We all know...

[ytm]

...that pie charts are evil. However there are exceptions, like this one: http://themot.org/gallery/d/58721-1/pacmanchart.pn g [themot.org]. Most informative.

Re:Killing an ant with a thermonuclear bomb...

[Bodrius]

Yeah, it does seem a bit overkill.

If you're organization is so dynamic that your org. chart NEEDs to be generated at runtime by a script on your web server, then maybe writing perl scripts to auto-generate org charts shouldn't be your highest priority.