NAME

       Chart::Manual::Workflows - different ways to create charts

OVERVIEW

       Four of the five major steps in creating a chart image are fixed in their order. First you
       have to load the module, secondly create create the object.  After that you
        may change some properties.  And always as a last step you create the image, no matter if
       the output goes to STDOUT or into a file.

       The only flexibility lies in how you prefer to provide the data.  And here you have three
       options. Most commonly you add one data set at the time, which could be also understood as
       a row of the complete data table.  Second option is to build the table column by column.
       Thirdly you can drop the complete table at once, either by reference to a data structure
       or a file containing the data.  The last option is  closed if you already given the object
       data.  It is not advisable to reuse a chart object for further image creation outside of
       modern art projects.

STEPS

       Most steps are already explained elsewhere and the OVERVIEW just links there. The missing
       bits are layed out here.

   use Chart
       As with any other Modul you have to:

         use Chart::[Type];

       Type being a placeholder for a name of a chart type, which are: Bars, Composite,
       Direction, ErrorBars, HorizontalBars, Lines, LinesPoints, Mountain, Pareto, Pie, Points,
       Split, StackedBars. To know more about them read Chart::Manual::Types.

       Alternatively write to load all chart types at ones with

         use Chart;

       Both are not importing any symbols in your name space but load Carp and GD.

   drop data
       All the methods listed in the last section, that create the final image, take as an
       optional, second argument data.  This data may be delivered either as a reference to an
       array of arrays:

           my $data = [ [ 1, 4, 3 ... ], # data set 0
                        [ 5, 8, 2 ... ], # data set 1
                        ...
           ];
           $graph->png( 'file.png', $data );

       or in form of a file. Then the argument has to be a file name or a file handle (old school
       as in "FILE" or modern as in $FH).  Alternatively use the method add_datafile.

   data files
       Are arbitrary named text files containing one or several rows of numbers, which have to be
       separated by spaces or tabs (\t) (mixing allowed).  Perl style comments or empty lines
       will be ignored, but rows containing different amount of numbers will cause problems.

   create image
       Currently we support only images in the PNG and JPEG format. The methods to create them
       are named straight forwardly: ->png and ->jpeg. Both take the same arguments and produce
       image files. For shell scripting or web programming you need the image binary, which you
       get with: ->cgi_png or ->cgi_jpeg. Some users might even want the GD object for further
       processing by your perl programm. In that case please use: ->scalar_png or ->scalar_jpeg.

       After having created a chart for web purposes, you also might want to utilize
       imagemap_dump.

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

       Copyright 2022 Herbert Breunung.

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

AUTHOR

       Herbert Breunung, <lichtkind@cpan.org>