[Haskell-cafe] library for drawing charts

[Tim Docker]

On 28/05/2008, at 3:16 AM, Peter Gammie wrote:
>
> So the library itself supports drawing these other types of charts?  
> Can you steer me towards some sample outputs?
>

I'm not sure what you mean here. There's three libraries involved there:

       - the charts library - this currently draws line/point plots  
etc (samples as shown on the web page)
       - the cairo library - this is a general purpose 2D drawing API
       - the gtkhs library - used if you want to show images drawn  
with cairo directly to the screen

At present there's no code for bar and pie charts.


> BTW Bjorn has written a binding to libgd. Does Cairo have similar  
> functionality, e.g. quizzing an image file for geometry info?
>

I don't know much about libgd, but having just read a description of it:

"GD is an open source code library for the dynamic creation of images  
by programmers. GD creates PNG, JPEG and GIF images, among other  
formats. GD is commonly used to generate charts, graphics,  
thumbnails, and most anything else, on the fly. While not restricted  
to use on the web, the most common applications of GD involve web  
site development."

it sounds like it overlaps with cairo a fair bit. Cairo has backends  
for vector as well as raster formats, however, and also supports  
hardware acceleration.

Tim