I have been looking for a good server side graphing / charting library that has a lot of design options. Most seem to be very difficult to customize the specific way we are looking to.
I don't mind if it is python, php, java, etc... I just need it to generate server side and output an image to be embedded on a pdf.
Specifically I need the following.
Gradients in bars fill color
Ability to have rounded edges on bars of chart
From a design perspective those are the important ones that I can not find in a specific library.
Ended up using MatPlotLib and used the example below. Essentially you can use an image and set the repeating area of the image. Instead of the gift boxes, I used a rounded corners horizontal gradient image.
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/examples/pylab_examples/demo_ribbon_box.html
Related
Is it possible to animate text/object with 'end' in after effects just like you do with strokes? How can I achieve this? See the video and you'll understand what I wan't to achieve.
YouTube - Guy showing the 'end' on a stroke
Cheers,
Tommie
I think I see what you are asking. You want the shapes of a text layer (the actual lines of each character) to actually build on, right? Can't be done like that. Even if you use text and convert to shapes, you are looking at a world of pain because of the way letters are built by most fonts (for one thing, the shapes are actually filled, not stroked -- strokes are outlines).
The only way I would do this is by using the Element 3D plugin in After Effects and Cheetah3D (or whatever 3D tool you want to use). In Cheetah, I'd create the text shapes as extruded 3D text. Then I'd use the "Build" modifier ("Linear" setting) to progressively build the text. Then I'd export that out as an OBJ sequence (script for this is available on cheetah forum site -- I wrote it) and bring that sequence into Element3D and work with it that way. That will work. And as far as I know, that's the only way with a decent amount of control. Wedding video? Just curious. :-)
Can any one point me to any resources for making graphs in HTML5? Most of resources I have seen through Google use animated graphs, I just want a simple static graph in HTML5. One more thing, I am really very weak in graphs, so a simple, easy to understand solution would be very helpful. I will be using this XML file to display data in graphical format.
US Canada Mortality
Thanks in advance :-)
Check out the new canvas tag. It allows you to draw shapes including rectangles and circles using javascript. Canvas Tutorials
If you're looking for just a standard bar chart, though, you can use the div tag with a specified width, height, and background color. This method avoids the use of javascript.
I'm trying to make a wheel, which will be sliced into different coloured sections (kinda like a pie chart) but they may have extra elements on top of them, e.g., a stitched border across the borders at the side and an icon at the edge of each, etc.
So my question is do I just use css3 (examples: http://www.css3shapes.com/)
and then use something like http://css3pie.com/ for Internet explorer 6-9?
Or am I just better off doing it in Photoshop and slapping it on a div as a background image? And use absolute positioning for extra elements?
Which is the best practice?
I would (and do) use PHP's GD extension to create a pie chart based on input data, save the image generated by that, and optionally generate an imagemap so parts of the chart can be highlighted, have tooltips, etc.
I really wouldn't use CSS for drawing shapes. It's hacky at best, and can get really messy. Quite a few of the examples in the cssshapes site you linked to don't even work in Firefox 3.6 - which is still quite heavily used - let alone other older browsers, and in IE you'd really struggle; css3pie won't give you the kind of fine-grained control you'd need for a pie chart.
If you want to draw stuff on the browser using on the client side, there are a number of ways to do so without resorting to hacks like CSS shapes.
Both SVG and Canvas are relatively new technologies for placing and manipulating graphics on the browser. SVG draws vector graphics and Canvas is for pixel-based graphics.
Both of them are supported on a wide variety of browsers. The obvious exception being IE8 and earlier. However, IE does support an alternative graphics format called VML, and there are javascript tools for IE which allow it to convert both SVG and Canvas into VML, so you can use either of them and they will work in IE using these tools, which makes both SVG and Canvas effectively cross-browser compatible.
But if you're drawing pie charts, or similar sorts of things, my personal recommendation would be to use the Raphael library. This is a javascript library which works in all browsers, and can be used to draw and animate pretty much anything, including graphs and charts (it even has a separate graphing add-on library. See the demos on those two sites to see what it's capable of; I think you'll be impressed. (I certainly was)
Hope that helps.
I want to develop an image editing application in Flex 4. My initial requirement is to draw various shapes like Line, Rectablge, Triangle, Circle, Star etc in appication. I want to facilitate user to draw shapes using rubber banding like professional applications do.
All shapes would be vector and should look smooth in an size. So, can't use bitmap and scale them.
What are better methods to achieve this?
if you don't want to start from scratch with the basic shapes, there is this framework called degrafa: http://www.degrafa.org/
they have plenty of parametric shapes & curves and advanced features to organize them together.
Make shape editor with some control points. Control points are draggable sprites (circles or squares as you like). When control point is moved, editor must be updated - it may be resize or move action. On resize, draw your vector shape according to new size. The easiest way to make sprite draggable is startDrag() function - you can also set limits there (to stay in editor area or to disable negative sizes).
I have done such editors based on Sprites, added into Flex application with rawChildren.addChild, but you can try to use Canvases instead of Sprites if you wish.
A customer has asked us to a add a feature to his website allowing visitors to colour in panels in a simple line drawing.
The website visitor will have a limited palette to choose from and will select a colour and click in a shape within the line drawing to colour it in as in:
There will only be four or five of these line drawings. The drawings themselves are not required to be interactive or flexible, only the colouring.
The line drawings will be super simple and we don't need to save the visitor's selections although the visitor will want to print or email the result.
Simple simple stuff. Most of the time where you see this done on sophisticated websites I assume it's done with Flash.
But is Flash the only way to go? Or can it be done with JQuery/Javascript or Silverlight or something else? Our team's knowledge covers ASP.NET, HTML, CSS, Javascript. No experience of Flash.
If you have a finite number of line drawings, and a limited number of colours, you could just pre-generate every possible colour/section combination - isolate each area as a transparent GIF/PNG and composite them using position:absolute to create an "onion skin" / animation cel effect. Use some old-school HTML image-map code (or server-side parsing of the myimage.X / myimage.Y parameters, or jQuery) to work out where they clicked, identify the image section under the mouse click location, and replace that image only with the corresponding version in their selected colour.
You can't draw these kinds of shape without using canvas or SVG. And I am not sure about the support provided by browsers for these.
If you can go for canvas then you ca ntake a look at
Processing js library
or for SVG
Raphaël—JavaScript Library
There are only two ways i can think of atm:
Split the line drawings into the colourable elements and show each image absolutly positioned to merge the images into one on the website.
Use Javascript to load a pre-coloured image of that part with "onclick" (or generate a coloured version with asp/php/whatever server-side.
Not sure if it's possible to print absolute positioned elements cleanly.
Use flash, it's simple there so even without experience you should be able to do it in 1-2 workdays.
My guess is that you could use the new HTML 5 canvas element to achieve this goal in an open, standards compliant manner.
Note: canvas is a new feature and is only supported in recent browser releases (latest Safari, Firefox or Chrome for example).