Pretty graphics generation

[oakbox]

I've spent a lot of frustrating time trying to find the 'best' way to create pretty graphics from data in my perl programs.

Spent a lot of time with GD.pm, it has a lot of easy-to-use modules built around it, but the graphics are always strongly aliased. There are tricks to lessen the aliasing, but nothing is perfect: Always a lot of hassle, no matter how much tweaking you do.

At one point, I looked at using POV-Ray files. POV-Ray graphing example Generating the text format file in perl, then doing a not-so-quick system call to ask POV-Ray to render the image for me. This was slow and 3-d only works for a limited range of information graphics.

I'm writing this because I'm bursting at the seams with excitement because I HAVE FOUND THE ANSWER: generating SVG files and using ImageMagik to convert those into whatever else you want (png,jpg,pdf,etc). SVG uses XML files and the syntax isn't overly weird. I started out using a WYSIWYG vector graphic program that exports SVG code http://www.sodipodi.com/, then manipulating the code in perl to produce what I was looking for. Mind you, as with most WYSIWYG's, I was able to reduce the auto-generated code by over 80%. But I learn better by having an example and tweaking it.

To introduce you to the joys of this format, if you are unfamiliar with it; here's an example graphic produced by running a perl-generated svg file through convert via a system call: http://www.oakbox.com/svg2png.png

And here is the svg file: http://www.oakbox.com/svg2png.svg.

And I get all this goodness by running
 system(convert svg2png.svg svg2png.png);

So, to sum up:
SVG + ImageMagick = Happiness

[TVSET]

system(convert svg2png.svg svg2png.png);

And you don't even have to do that, since ImageMagick has perl interface via Image::Magick.

[Anonymous Monk]

I am converting sample.svg to samle.png using system(convert sample.svg sample.png). But the output png file is in full black color. Please help me Sharath

[Anonymous Monk]

SVG

[Velaki]

I've done some work with pulling config data from databases, and then using povray to generate scads of images for a few companies. Not the fastest, but decent.

In my spare time, I've been working on adapting povray source to XS, so I can build modules, and then a mod_perl module / mod_pov for apache. It would be nice to have slightly faster semi-real-time raytracing going on. If you want faster, you go for scanline rendering, like blender. The quality isn't as good, but for basic graphs, it's pretty clever.

-v