Thanks

Very nice. I have a feeling I will be using it.

If you are developing a charting package, I would highly recommend you start reading a blog about good chart design. I’d reccomend http://junkcharts.typepad.com which critiques graphics found in the media.

A more comprehensive (and more expensive) resource is The Grammar of Graphics

Thanks for the link. I’ll check it out.

This is great. I’m going to be using the pie graphs in an upcoming app.

Now if only Rmagick was easy to install on my windows dev box…

Shaun, before you use pie graphs in your app, google for pie charts bad and read some of the results.

I found Gruff easy to use, and the diagrams look nice. I used Gruff to make animated diagrams showing the use of work buffers in process simulations. The latest animation can be found at http://kallokain.blogspot.com/2006/02/variance-trap-part-4.html.

I had to do one slight modification. I found no way to set a fixed scale. This is a problem when doing animations, because the scale changes from frame to frame. however, the problem was easily solved. I wrote a simple mixin that added accessors for scaling the Y-axis. It works like a chanrm. I’ll be happy to email it to you if you are interested.

Right now the simulation software uses Gruff to write a sequence of images. A separate animation script executes ImageMagick commands directly. (The animation program just sort of happened while a friend and I were discussing the simulation system.)

I plan to use RMagick to build the animation capabilities in, but I want to get the simulation engine a bit more stable first. It is still very much a prototype.

Without Gruff there wouldn’t be a simulation engine, so I am very happy with it.