

Ask HN: Favorite software and/or guides for graphing/charting/visualizations? - lionhearted

What's your favorite software for making pretty graphs, charts, and visualizations?<p>Also, any good guides on doing so?<p>I feel like I've seen a guide or two come through HN that was decent in the past, but not finding anything on SearchYC. All suggestions very appreciated.
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dmlorenzetti
Largely for historical reasons, I mostly use R. It requires a lot of care &
feeding, but rewards you with a lot of control.

A colleague uses MatPlotLib under Python. He makes nice-looking plots with it,
and when I watch him driving it, I feel like I could learn to work with it
pretty easily. The only reason I haven't given it a real try is the cost of
setting up the larger framework I would want to use to generate the points I
plot.

I used gnuplot for a project. It's conceptually easy to work with, but the
inconsistent looks between different output formats (e.g., PNG vs SVG) made me
choose it simply because scripting it from the command line was easy. Another
gripe I had was that, given a file with multiple columns of data to plot, it
has to parse the file once for every curve it puts in the plot. Finally, I
found gnuplot wasn't very smart about how it chose points when plotting
expressions (e.g., telling it to plot "sin(x)" rather than passing it points
on a sine curve).

Re guides, I liked William Cleveland's "Elements of Graphing Data". However,
I'm not widely-read on this subject, so this is kind of one point in the
noise.

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jim_h
<http://www.highcharts.com/> seems pretty nice.

Unfortunately their developer license seems to have increased by $100 since
the last time I checked.

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iSavants
The Google Charts API is pretty decent and free.
<http://code.google.com/apis/chart/>

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jim_h
Is there an option to use Google Charts without posting the data back to
google?

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jim_h
<http://raphaeljs.com/> is also another option.

