PstChart macro

[Denis Girou]

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>>>>> "Ludovic.Kuty" == Ludovic Kuty <kuty at run.montefiore.ulg.ac.be> writes:

    Ludovic.Kuty> I'd like to know where I can find the PstChart script.
    Ludovic.Kuty> I was not able to get it from what seems to be the PstChart page
    Ludovic.Kuty> that is http://tug.org/applications/PSTricks/PstChart/
    Ludovic.Kuty> I've been searching at different places but without success.

  PstChart was never freely distributed. The Web page said clearly (I thought!):

  "I definitely do not want to put it in the public domain, and will send it
only to motivated people which do not want to wait [the new version], and at
their own risks."

  I confess that it had a rather bad history. I start in 1992 to write a small 
script to generate pie charts for some statistics I must generate periodically.
At this time, I use xmgr for bar charts, which was one of the rare tools for
this at the moment (of course, I speak only for the Unix world). But I decided
later to improve the quality of my bar charts and to avoid EPS inclusion for
that. So, I wrote the first version of PstChart in some free time in the
summer of 1993, and add some enhancements later. I planned at this period to
distribute it when it would be stabilized, but my experience with the first
users was rather disappointing: too many portability problems (Shell and AWK
were reasonable choices in 1993, but appeared too problematic for
portability), and too many requirements for new functionalities. So, I decided
some time later to rewrite it from scratch, to have better modularity and
flexibility to allow enhancements, and to use a really portable language. But,
as it is not a small work, I never really start it, involved in other tasks.

  What I can say today is:
    - this is still not in my projects for the next six months,
    - I still think it could be useful and keep advantages comparing to other
tools, specially for LaTeX and PSTricks users (and at least for me...),
so I still hope to do it one day,
    - the situation has greatly changed since 1993. There are now a lot of
tools for business charts (spoken for the Unix world too). Even if I have
only interest for tools used in batch mode for repetitive usage or scripting
generation, and that many of these tools have an interactive orientation,
there are other powerful alternatives:
      + MicroPress has recently released a preliminary version of such tool,
with a PSTricks-like interface (but this is relative to VTeX only and not
portable). See the documentation of MGraph in
ftp://ftp.micropress-inc.com/pub/os2-test/mgraph.zip
      + as far as I know (but there are too many solutions to be sure to
haven't missed some important one), the two most powerful and portable tools
for this kinds of business charts are today
GDChart: http://www.aestus.net/gdchart/ and Ploticus: http://www.sgpr.net/

D.G.

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