Chart::Clicker – Perl charting library

August 23rd, 2009 Version 2.4.2: Tabular Legend

As requested by in #chart-clicker I’ve added a tabular legend.

You can learn how to use it by checkout out the docs for Legend::Tabular on CPAN (when it shows up!).

Posted in Features, Releases

July 30th, 2009 Version 2.4.1: Titles

As requested by nelish in #chart-clicker I’ve added titles.

The font used is the beautiful new Calluna.

Posted in Features, Releases

July 11th, 2009 Latest Work: Book

Lately I’ve ben playing with the idea of writing a book about Clicker. Ultimately I play to offer it for sale at a sane price as a PDF with an option to buy a dead-tree version. In the interest of getting some work out I’m releasing an early version (PDF). Let me know what you think!

Posted in Book

May 23rd, 2009 Using User-Installed Fonts with Clicker

If you are a Mac user and have tried to use fonts that you installed in your local Fonts directory, you may have had some trouble. I’ve tried to fix this a few times, but never found the hint I needed. Today that changed!

Create a ~/.fonts.conf that contains the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file to configure system font access -->
<fontconfig>
 
<!-- Font directory list -->
<!-- Add to system list -->
 
        <dir>/System/Library/Fonts</dir>
        <dir>/Library/Fonts</dir>
        <dir>~/Library/Fonts</dir>
 
</fontconfig>

This should enable any font-config enabled application to find your precious fonts!

Posted in Support

May 8th, 2009 New Renderer: CandleStick

This has been on my list for quite some time and tonight I finally got around to it.

It’s included in the latest release, just uploaded to CPAN.

Posted in Features, Releases

May 2nd, 2009 Proper Text Rotation

The just-uploaded 2.24 release of Chart::Clicker depends on a fresh release of the Graphics::Primitive Cairo driver. This is important because Clicker’s ornery text-rotation bug is now gone. Previously, rotation didn’t calculate a bounding box, it instead allocated space that was a square as big as original box’s largest dimension. The yield can be seen quickly in this composite of a before (0.36) and after (0.37) shot of a simple chart:

You can see how much space was wasted on the vertical y-axis label. On the right things are sized properly.

The only other “major” bug I’ve got hanging around in Clicker is an overflow bug due to broken legend wrapping. I’ll attack this next.

Posted in Features, Releases

April 27th, 2009 Refining The Line

The latest release of Clicker fixes some undocumented behavior of the Line renderer and makes it easier to add borders to shapes added to the line, like so:

This is a comment effect used in many modern charts. I’m not sure as to the utility of it, but it increases the ink-to-data ratio, thereby passing one of the tests installed by my study of Tufte.

You can use this feature in the upcoming 2.23 release.

Posted in Features, Releases

April 5th, 2009 New Renderer: Stacked Line

Well, not really new. The Line renderer is now capable of producing stacked output. All you need to do is set the additive attribute to a true value!

Stacked Line