Displaying graphs
31 Jan 2008My Expert System shell produces graph objects using the Graph::Easy module. I could probably switch over to using the regular flavor of Graph, but for now I'm not. Graph::Easy has the option to output into GraphViz, SVG, and HTML outputs. What I want is the ability to display one of these graphs in my Tk program, without having to open an external file viewer.
There are two possible paths to take: I can find a way to convert the SVG output to an image format (JPEG or PNG should be fine) and then display the image file, or I can find a widget that can natively display SVG images.
One requirement that I have (it's a firm requirement, although not an absolute one) is that I would like to try to find a pure-perl solution, or at least a solution that doesn't require me to compile any XS code. There are many reasons for this, and I won't take the time to explain them all here. Eventually I'm going to switch to Strawberry Perl, and will probably lift this restriction.
Tk::Zinc, and SVG::SVG2Zinc seemed like a good combination, but ActiveState doesnt offer either in it's download repository. It also doesnt offer Tk::HyperText (which should be able to render the HTML output versions of my graphs), or Tk::GraphViz. This would seem to indicate that I can't find an (easy) solution involving just Tk widgets.
I also haven't been able to find a satisfactory solution for converting GraphViz, SVG, or HTML into an image file. Of course, maybe I haven't been searching hard enough, or looking for the right keywords. Many of the modules I do find for this purpose are based on compiled libraries such as GD, LibRSVG, Cairo, etc. SVG::Convert, which seems to have a PNG output mode, isn't downloadable from activestate. SVG::GD is available for download, but relies on GD which is not. GD::SVG isn't available either, but it doesnt look like that library supports what I want to do anyway.
I'll keep looking, this is the first day of my search and I'm not putting a lot of effort into it.
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