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List:       novalug
Subject:    [ma-linux] Re: [novalug] Graphing data in/from Gnumeric
From:       Jon Sime <jon () thinkgeek ! com>
Date:       2001-10-31 23:26:40
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I have to agree with the suggestion of GD. I use it in conjunction with
the GD.pm perl module to generate several hundred to a few thousand graphs
for dozens of reports every day. On-the-fly and pregenerated. You don't
get much in the way of fonts and there's nothing fancy like anti-aliasing,
but it's data that's important, right? ;)

GD is also fast. Very fast. I've never seen it take longer than a few
milliseconds to process all the calls I make to generate graphs, start to
finish -- for graphs with a couple datapoints to ones with hundreds and
more.

ImageMagick is another popular graphics library that can be accessed
through Perl, C, C++, etc. I've used it, and while you can generate much
prettier graphs with it, it's considerably slower (especially when using
scalable fonts).

GD's also pretty straightforward to learn and use. I believe there are 
other modules that wrap GD for the sole purpose of graph generation, 
though I've never tried those out (rolled my own).

I'd recommend GD if you need speed (which you probably would want, since 
you're going for on-the-fly generation), and ImageMagick if you're going 
to pre-generate the graphs and want them to be really pretty.


--
Jon R. Sime                                                   ThinkGeek
jon@thinkgeek.com                               Co-Founder, IT Director
-----------------------------------------------------------------------


On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Matthew Fite wrote:

> I don't know about Gnumeric, but as far as creating
> JPEG/PNG (not GIF) images 'on the fly' gd is nice.
> 
> http://www.boutell.com/gd/
> 
> Bindings for C/C++, tcl, what have you.  There is also
> a perl module available via
> http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=GD
> 
> I've used it to graph router usage statistics on the
> fly from a web page.
> 
> matt
>  
> --- Rich Goodwin <rgoodwin@early.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I have a spreadsheet in Gnumeric with essentially
> > dates and timestamps that I have manually extracted
> > from logfiles.  I would like to generate a line
> > chart of the data points.  What is your favorite way
> > to do this?  
> > 
> > Why?  Well, I want to graph server hits ... an LDAP
> > server not web server .....  Of course the next
> > question is, if I munge the data down to files using
> > awk, perl or whatever, what is your "favorite" way
> > to automatically generate a JPEG/PNG/GIF on the fly
> > for inclusion in a web page?
> > 
> > I know I have seen some discussions on this in the
> > past but I need to think while I deal with the
> > neighborhood ghouls and goblins.
> > 
> > Rich
> > _______________________________________________
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