* From: Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>

For those of you interested, below is an extremely simple example of a
tiny standalone program that can read an .xac file (specified as the
first argument and then let you select accounts to plot from a Gtk
window.  The plot is just a per-transaction running balance, but it's
a start.  You need Gtk and plotutils 2.0 installed for this to work.

try 
ftp://ftp.digex.net/pub/gnu/plotutils-2.0.tar.gz
ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/plotutils-2.0.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/plotutils-2.0.tar.gz

Issues:

This program is trivial, and it only works via a Gtk GUI.  In the end
I think we should support both interactive and non-interactive
operation of our graphing and reporting tools.  Whether this happens
via special arguments to xacc, or by providing separate standalone
programs that link to a common library (libxaccplot?) I don't know,
but either way, I think we need both.

This little program generates the graph by launching a child "graph"
process (graph is part of the plotutils package).  I don't set any
axis labels or anything.  This could obviously be improved, but there
are limits to how flexible the graph program is.  It can't, for
example, do pie or bar charts at the moment.

The lower level library (libplot) that graph is based on will allow us
to do whatever we want, although we'll have to do all the scaling,
drawing, etc, that graph normally handles.  Right now, graph's
functionality is only availble in the executable, but after talking to
the upstream author, he's decided to turn most of graph into a
library.  As a result it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time
right now re-implementing graph's functionality in libplot.  We should
just wait, executing graph as a separate process to handle normal XY
plots for now.  Our current efforts should be directed at implementing
graph types plotutils doesn't handle (like pie and bar), and into work
on the general graphing infrastructure.

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>
PGP fingerprint = E8 0E 0D 04 F5 21 A0 94  53 2B 97 F5 D6 4E 39 30
