[pstricks] PstChart

[Denis Girou]

>>>>> "I.Wayan.Warmada" == I Wayan Warmada <warmada at netscape.net> writes:

    I.Wayan.Warmada> You have written in the piechart README about
    I.Wayan.Warmada> PstChart with an URL reference. Is that project
    I.Wayan.Warmada> already finished? I can not read that URL.

  Yes, I suppressed the accesses, for something which had not progressed
since several years and that I choose to never publicly diffuse. As I was too
much bother by questions and requirements, I decided to remove everything.

  I will never diffuse it because I am convainced that I did not made the good
choices for such project when I started it (do not forget that it was in 1993,
when the tools available were different than today and when I knew less about
TeX programming). The basic tools I used (AWK and Shell) appeared to generate
too many portability problems according the platforms used and the too many
flavors of these programs available. And my code was already huge (3000 lines
without the comments and around 120 parameters to manage, which many of them
interacting with some others) and had reached it maximum level of complexity,
but was not enough modular and flexible to be developped any more.

  So, I was convainced since a long time that it need to be rewritted from
scratch. I thought primarily to do it it Perl, mostly as translation of the
AWK and Shell features. But I thought later that it would be better to write
it in OO-Perl than in procedural Perl, then better in Python than in OO-Perl,
then better in Java that in Python, then that nevertheless the best choice
for such tool would be probably plain TeX and PSTricks only, which will offer
the best portability. I made some experiments in 2000, and verified that I
must know how to implement things and solve the various problems to got nearly
the same results with the `pst-chrt' package than with the PstChart tool.
There are obviously various problems to solve, but I must know how to do at
the TeX level or at the PostScript level.

  What is missing is only time. I have not the several hundreds of hours that
will be required and I do not think that I will found them before a rather
long time...

  Even if I think that it still have an interest to have such portable tool
at the TeX level, don't forget that the situation had evolved a lot since
1993. At this time there were very few solutions available in the public
domain (I write my first piechart.sh script because I did not found a solution
for pie charts, then I extented it in PstChart to bar and line charts, because
I was not too much happy which xmgr that I used at this moment). But today,
there are (too!) many softwares publicly available, some of them with very
rich capabilities (but requiring to generate external images to insert them in
a TeX document). Look at least at the following softwares:

GDChart    http://www.fred.net/brv/chart/
Grace      http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/
jCharts    http://jcharts.sourceforge.net/
JFreeChart http://jrefinery.com/jfreechart/
JpGraph    http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/ 
Ploticus   http://ploticus.sourceforge.net/
PLplot     http://plplot.sourceforge.net/
PtPlot     http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/java/ptplot5.1p1/ptolemy/plot/doc
Pychart    http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Yasushi_Saito/pychart/

D.G.