This is GIFgraph, a package to generate GIF charts, using Lincoln Stein's
GD.pm.

INSTALLATION

needed to install (also see TESTED PLATFORMS):

	perl 5.004
	GD > 1.14

to install:

	perl Makefile.PL
	make
	make test
	make install

NB: If you don't use the same version of GD that I have (1.18), some
of the tests may fail (specifically, the area test). You should be
able to ignore this failure, if the samples files give you good
results. IOW: Check the samples in the samples directory. If they look
good, then GIFgraph will work fine.

to see some samples:

	cd samples
	make

That should generate a set of gifs, which you can view using the HTML
pages in the same directory (or whichever other way pleases you).

The documentation available is contained in GIFgraph.pm, as pod.

The latest release should normally be available from CPAN and from 
http://www.tcp.chem.tue.nl/~tgtcmv/perl/

TESTED PLATFORMS (also see NOTES FOR WIN32)

- perl 5.004_04 on Solaris 2.5.1, GD 1.15
- perl 5.004_04 on Solaris 2.6, GD 1.18
- perl 5.005_01 on Solaris 2.6, GD 1.18
- perl 5.004_02 for win32 by Gurusamy Sarathy, GD (1.14 I think)
- perl 5.004_04 HP-UX 10.20, GD 1.18 (Ronald Post)

AUTHOR

Martien Verbruggen
mgjv@comdyn.com.au
tgtcmv@chem.tue.nl

MOST IMPORTANT CHANGES SINCE VERSION 1.01

- Vertical printing of X axis labels
- CHANGED DEFAULTS for zero_axis and zero_axis_only
- Fixed problems with negative values, data ranges without 0, and
  printing of the x axis labels (I hope)
- No more support for perl 5.003. Since perl 5.005 is out, and I don't
  have a 5.003 here to test all the time, I won't support it anymore.

MOST IMPORTANT CHANGES SINCE VERSION 0.91

- Legends
- Support for negative numbers
- Ticks for X axis
- line types and widths
- Allow entries in data set to be undef (to skip them)
- Changed 'zero' angle for pie charts (was right, now is front/bottom)
- Definition of colours now possible. See GIFgraph::colour::read_rgb
  for details
- See file CHANGES for more

TODO

- 3d look for graphs
- logarithmic scaling
- numerical X axes
- Autoloading/splitting, etc
- More options, split up some options.
- Mixed Graphs
- Better preset options for certain graph types

BUG FIXES IN THIS VERSION

See file BUGS

NOTES FOR WIN32

GIFgraph installs and runs well under Gurusamy Sarathy's port of perl
for win32, and its usage is exactly the same as documented.

The ActiveState port for win32 can be used with Dave Roth's port of GD
for win32. This port, however has a peculiarity. It is impossible to
manipulate the gif data in memory (the GD::Image::gif() method always
writes to a file descriptor, instead of returning the data). This
makes the use of GIFgraph with that port impossible without a lot of
work.
This means that until someone ports GD for the ActiveState perl with
full support for all its functionality, GIFgraph will not work on
ActiveState's port.

THANKS

	brian d foy
	Honza Pazdziora
	DBelcher
	Vegard Vesterheim

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1995-1997 Martien Verbruggen. All rights reserved.

This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.