Chartviz is a tool that works with charts that are written in plain text, such as line, bar and gauges. Here are some examples.
day,high_temp (*)
0 150
+---------------------------------------------------+
1| * | 20
2| * | 15
3| * | 21
4| * | 25
+---------------------------------------------------+
0 150
+---------------------------------------------------+
1|**************** | 20
2|*************** | 15
3|***************** | 21
4|******************** | 35
+---------------------------------------------------+
0 150
+----------------------------------------------------+
|=============================== | 76
+----------------------------------------------------+
Since these charts are a bit difficult construct manually, chartviz will create these for you from simple delimited text data or even clean up an existing chart as a formatter. The charts are difficult to injest by other tools, such as sed, grep, or a spreadsheet so chartviz will also export a chart as a delimited text stream. Here is the comma-separated value (CSV) equivalent of the charts above.
day,high_temp
1,20
2,15
3,21
4,35
1,20
2,15
3,21
4,35
76
The two formats can be mixed like this so that you can insert data into the charts easily. Chartviz can parse and format the chart with this new data.
0 150
+---------------------------------------------------+
1| * | 20
2| * | 15
3| * | 21
4| * | 25
5,55
6,22
+---------------------------------------------------+
Chartviz will also produce image files for either chart, CSV, or mixed input.