Haskell Charts

A library for rendering 2D charts from haskell.

Features

Line, Point, Bar and Fill plots, along with combinations.
Basic Pie Charts
Automatic layout adjustment
Auto-scaling of axis values
Linear, Log, and Time axes
2 APIs: one simpler, one more flexible
Extensible to support new plot types and new layouts
Rendering to PNG, PS, SVG and PDF files as well as GTK windows (and potentially other cairo backends)

News

28 May 2009

v0.11 of the library has been uploaded to hackage. New features:

The library now uses Russell O'Connor colour package, and hence supports transparency
marker lines that span the width/height of a chart

25 March 2009

Don Stewart has put together a short movie showing the library in action.

22 February 2009

V0.10 has been pushed to hackage. Main changes include:

Support for bar charts
Compatible with gtk2hs 0.10
Tested with ghc 6.10

28 October 2008

V0.9 has been pushed to hackage. There's quite a lot of changes here. They include:

Improved type safety in plots. A layout is now parametrised by the types of its axes. In addition to potentially reducing bugs, this also means that the style of axis (eg normal v. log v. time) is chosen automatically, depending on the data plotted.
Use of Data.Accessor to make all those record types in the API easier to user
A flag to reverse the direction an axis is drawn
Preliminary support for "picking", ie the ability to make coordinates in the resulting chart back to meaningful application values. The API is finished, but the internals are not yet complete.

These changes result in changes to the API. Feedback on these changes are welcome.

Also, I've set up a mailing list for announcements and discussions: http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-charts

11 August 2008

Haddock lives! I've updated the public API documentation to match v 0.8.

6 July 2008

New features in the just released v 0.8 include:

Better control over lines styles and fonts
Cairo SVG output support
Simple Pie Charts (thanks to sample code originally posted by Neal Alexander)

Apologies that the API docs on this ste are still a bit out of date. Having upgraded to ghc 6.8.3, it seems there's no haddock yet to support it.

8 May 2008

Another version, tagged "CHART_0_7", and uploaded to hackage. New we have:

Automatic scaling of time axes
Error bars
An extensible monad for rendering
Slightly improved image quality for bitmap outputs

Note that the haddock API documentation linked to below is a little out of date. This new version makes user of the newtype deriving ghc extension, which isn't parsed by my ailing haddock 0.8. Time to upgrade it...

10 Mar 2008

I've tagged the current version "CHART_0_6", and uploaded the package to hackage. New features include:

The new Simple API
Axis titles
Significant improvments to the layout code that should make it easy to make layout changes (or create new layouts) going forward.

25 Feb 2008

I've pushed David Roundy's patches implementing the "simple" interface. This makes usage from within ghci feasible. A tag and release to hackage will follow. See the comments at the the start of Simple.hs for information and examples.

/OldNews

Examples

Simple API

The "simple" API is straightforward to use directly from the ghci REPL. For example:

$ ghci -package Chart
...
Prelude> :m Graphics.Rendering.Chart.Simple
Prelude Graphics.Rendering.Chart.Simple> plotWindow [0,0.1..2.9] sin

will produce a chart in a window:

Standard API

(Click on the example to enlarge and view it's haskell source)

Documentation

The documentation automatically generated by haddock is available here. This corresponds to the repo state tagged CHART_0_6'

To-Do

(too long to list!)

Dependencies

Cairo interface for haskell. This is presently only available within the gt2hs library.
Cabal >= 1.2. This comes with ghc-6.8, but needs to be installed in 6.6
data-accessor
colour

Download

via darcs, with the command: darcs get http://www.dockerz.net/repos/chart or get a (maybe more) stable version from hackage.

To build

Follow the usual cabal routine. If you fetched from darcs:

cd chart
runghc Setup.hs configure
runghc Setup.hs build
sudo runghc Setup.hs install

or from hackage:

tar -xzf Chart-0.9.tar.gz
cd Chart-0.9
runghc Setup.hs configure
runghc Setup.hs build
sudo runghc Setup.hs install

(Cabal note: the sudo is required to install into a system wide ghc package database. If you want to install only for the current user, then add something like "--user --prefix ~/ghc_local" to the configure line, and drop the sudo)

Finally, to build the set of test charts into a single executable:

cd tests; ghc --make test.hs
./test

Credits

Thanks to David Roundy, Francisco Jerez, and Russell O'Connor for contributing patches.

Contact

Mailing List : http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-charts

or Tim Docker: attachment:email.png

Patches welcome!