Are there any packages for creating charts?

Question

I'm looking for a package in which you can create nice bar and/or line charts in LaTeX. Currently I'm plotting the charts in Calc (OpenOffice), export it to a PDF document, crop it and then including it as graphics.

I reckon there should be some more efficient way of doing this, preferably entirely in LaTeX.

Answer 1

You can take a look at PGF/TikZ, then on top of that is pgfplots. To see it in action, see TeXample.net.

Answer 2

with PSTricks you can have also 3D charts with hidden surfaces

Answer 3

I can't seem to be able to correctly format multiline code in a comment, thus I'm adding another answer voting for PGF/TikZ, it's great!

Here's an (slightly adapted :) example of a plot I recently made with pgfplots.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\usepackage[pdftex,active,tightpage]{preview}
\begin{document}
\begin{preview}
    \begin{tikzpicture}
        \begin{axis}[
            ylabel={Some Label [\%]},
            ybar,
            bar width=62pt,
            xtick=data,
            xticklabel={Something},
            legend style={at={(0.05,0.62)},anchor=north west}
            ]       
        \addplot coordinates {(0,13)};
        \addplot coordinates {(0,42)};
        \legend{First Thing,Second Thing}
        \end{axis}
    \end{tikzpicture}
\end{preview}
\end{document}

Answer 4

To keep in line with previous answers, you can look at Metapost or Asymptote, though I guess it might be easier to use a combination of R and Sweave for that particular purpose, especially if you want to load your data from an external file (but see related questions tagged sweave).

Answer 5

I would use pgf/TikZ too, just like other users who answered.

There are some really old packages bar, barkom. An newer one, worth a try, is bardiag, based on PSTricks.

A PSTricks package for this purpose is pst-bar.