Looking for SMALL program to create graphs

Mike Davies · 06-30-2007, 03:00 AM

I'm looking for a program to generate graphs for a web server application in an embedded linux environment.

I don't have a lot of memory free. The whole system is only 32Mb, and my complete file-system must be less than 8Mb

I've looked at a few possibilities, e.g. perl and gnuplot, but they need so much other stuff. Can anyone recommend anything ?

jschiwal · 06-30-2007, 04:28 AM

Wouldn't it work better to supply the data used to produce the graphs. Maybe the data could exported in the form of xml documents.

Mike Davies · 06-30-2007, 05:07 AM

Hmmm, maybe. Problem is, I don't know anything about XML. Maybe this is the time to find out.

pwc101 · 06-30-2007, 05:28 AM

You might want to look at GMT (generic mapping tools) which has a function called psxy which can produce very customisable postscript images of graphs. I don't think it has many dependencies (netCDF is the main one I think), and is entirely command line driven, so overheads are reduced. If you need help on using it, give me a shout as I use GMT every day at work!

http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/

To download it, get it from one of these mirrors (version 4 is the latest):

ftp://life.csu.edu.au/pub/gmt
ftp://ftp.geologi.uio.no/pub/gmt
ftp://ftp.scc.u-tokai.ac.jp/pub/gmt
ftp://falcon.grdl.noaa.gov/pub/gmt
ftp://ftp.iag.usp.br/pub/gmt
ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/gmt
ftp://ftp.iris.washington.edu/pub/gmt
ftp://ftp.soest.hawaii.edu/gmt

Mike Davies · 06-30-2007, 11:43 AM

Nice idea. Graphics look impressive, trouble is the FAQ says it's 15 to 50Mb. I don't have anywhere near that amount of capacity

phidor · 07-01-2007, 12:07 AM

I used to use "Mathplot" when we ran with Mandriva - cannot recall the size off hand but it is a nice wee package that works beautifully.

Phidor.

pwc101 · 07-01-2007, 06:18 AM

You could probably hack the psxy source code so it would compile on its own without all the dependencies (specifically netCDF which I think it quite large), and that would allow you to plot simple xy scatter/line plots. On its own, psxy shouldn't be too big...

But, it could be a lot of work!

maroonbaboon · 07-01-2007, 07:49 AM

Maybe you just want a library that can generate images in PNG or similar format, with primitives for line drawing and labelling. Then you can just wrap it up inside your own C code.

How about Ilib. The source is just a 131Kb download.

There is also a list of competing libraries on the site.