This is the first beta release of GIFgraph, a package to generate GIF
charts, using Lincoln Stein's GD.pm.

INSTALLATION

needed to install (also see TESTED PLATFORMS):

	perl 5.003 (perl5.004 recommended)
	GD 1.14 (GD 1.15 recommended)

to install:

	perl Makefile.PL
	make
	make test
	make install

NB: If you don't use GD 1.15, but another version, some of the tests
may fail (specifically, the area test). You should be able to ignore
this failure, if the samples files give you good results.

to see some samples:

	cd samples
	make

That should generate a set of gifs, which you can view using the HTML
pages in the same directory (or whichever other way pleases you).

The documentation available is contained in GIFgraph.pm, as pod.

The latest release should normally be available from CPAN and from 
http://www.tcp.chem.tue.nl/~tgtcmv/perl/

TESTED PLATFORMS (also see NOTES FOR WIN32)

- perl 5.004_04 on Solaris 2.5.1, GD 1.15
- perl 5.004_02 for win32 by Gurusamy Sarathy, GD (1.14 I think)

AUTHOR

Martien Verbruggen
mgjv@comdyn.com.au
tgtcmv@chem.tue.nl

MOST IMPORTANT CHANGES SINCE VERSION 0.91

- Legends
- Support for negative numbers
- Ticks for X axis
- line types and widths
- Allow entries in data set to be undef (to skip them)
- Changed 'zero' angle for pie charts (was right, now is front/bottom)
- Definition of colours now possible. See GIFgraph::colour::read_rgb
  for details

TODO

- 3d look for graphs (don't hold your breath for this one)
- logarithmic scaling
- numerical X axes
- Autoloading/splitting, etc
- More options, split up some options.
- Mixed Graphs
- Preset options for certain graph types

BUG FIXES IN THIS VERSION

See file BUGS

NOTES FOR WIN32

GIFgraph installs and runs well under Gurusamy Sarathy's port of perl
for win32, and its usage is exactly the same as documented.

The ActiveState port for win32 can be used with Dave Roth's port of GD
for win32. This port, however has a peculiarity. It is impossible to
manipulate the gif data in memory (the GD::Image::gif() method always
writes to a file descriptor, instead of returning the data). This
makes the use of GIFgraph with that port impossible without a lot of
work.
This means that until someone ports GD for the ActiveState perl with
full support for all its functionality, GIFgraph will not work on
ActiveState's port.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1995-1997 Martien Verbruggen. All rights reserved.

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