Re: [guppi-list] Guppi Web Interface

[Jon Trowbridge <trow gnu org>]

On Tue, Jan 16, 2001 at 12:51:38PM -0600, Leyth Kedidi wrote:
> I need to generate professional looking
> charts on a web page I've been working for and I stumbled
> on Guppi. I was wondering if there was already a tool or program
> that generates GIF or PNG images of the charts suitable for the
> web?

OK, here is the overly-brief summary of the situation w/ this.

Guppi can already run in batch-mode, i.e. it can be controlled by scripts
and run without needing X running.  So it wouldn't be a big leap to
run Guppi from some CGI program to generate web graphics.

The main problem is that, right now, the only way to emit images from
Guppi while in batch mode is as postscript.  So you could always use
ghostscript to rasterize the images, but that seems pretty hacky (and
text would come out looking sort of crappy too).

Since gnome-print (and hence Guppi) can render to a GdkPixbuf, the
main thing needed would be a way to save a GdkPixbuf as a PNG.  I
actually discussed this with Michael Meeks several months ago: at that
time he said that saving GdkPixbufs was possible, but was also very
gross and hacky.  Maybe the GdkPixbuf infrastructure has improved since
then.

Once GdkPixbuf->PNG was working, the changes to add that feature to
Guppi would be pretty trivial... it would probably take me half an
hour or less.  Then the only barrier would be writing the scripts to
generate your plots.  Since the python scripting seems to be mildly
broken(*), you'd probably need to use Guile.

-JT

(*) ...and it stays broken because I don't know the first thing about
Python.  If there are any python gurus out there who want to give
Guppi's Python bindings some TLC, drop me a line.