piechart component project

[Bernhard Reiter <bernhard uwm edu>]

Okay, here again my attempt to post to the guppi list,
the origional mail header was:

To: miguel@roxanne.nuclecu.unam.mx, guppi@gnome.org
Cc: Jan-Oliver Wagner <jwagner@usf.uni-osnabrueck.de>,
        Frank Koormann <fkoorman@usf.uni-osnabrueck.de>
Subject: Piechchart component project

Dear Miguel, Dear guppi Mailinglist inhabitants,

we want to contribute a piechart component to the free software world!

We, that means Jan-Oliver Wagner, Frank Koormann und Bernhard Reiter.
For us it shall be a small project to get further into the world
of free software. (The "I" in this mail refers to Bernhard.)

The piechart component was selected, because it is a task which can be
separated quite easily from other tasks and a component which is needed
badly for a lot of reasons. It should be possible to further enhance
the project's results to general chart making capabilities.

We will try going for the piechart and hope to create a data format,
a command-line program and a GUI editor program which all should be
very portable. Aim is to create nice looking piecharts with ease and the
possibility to connect the program or library to any spreadsheet.
The editor functions would help to change the typical parameters
of a piechart. It should create many outputformats, so that general
graphic editors (like xfig) can be used to further process the results
to make up very fancy piecharts for different uses.

The idea was born, after I wrote a small program, to use the GNU
plotutils library to create simple piecharts.
(http://www.usf.uni-osnabrueck.de/~breiter/tools/piechart/piecharts.en.html)

Of course there are a lot of free software projects out there, which
already deal with providing a possibility of creating charts or
something similiar. We are aware of that, but still believe that the
approaches do not solve the problem completly and are not portable enough.

Richard Stallman suggested adding our wanted functionality or products
to one of the existing free projects. He also suggested contacting you.
We will also contact a lot of other people, like Robert Maier who
maintains the GNUplotutils.

The guppi project seems to be the one most closely related.
I am subscribed to the mailing list now and we hope to further discuss
the issue with you. It looks as we should integrate our piecharts
facilities in guppi and therefore GNOME in some way.

Kind Regards,
	Bernhard

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