NAME

braillegraph - a simple histogram tool that produces text output

SYNOPSIS

braillegraph <data series

psql -At -c 'select ...' |braillegraph

DESCRIPTION

braillegraph takes a single data series and plots them abusing the Braille range (U+2800..U+28FF). It is able to display two values per a horizontal character, thus a plain text mail can hold an X range up to ~150 data points. The vertical resolution is 4/character, thus a reasonable Y range is up to 80ish.

By default, no scaling is done at all — one dot is exactly one data point horizontally, a value of 1 vertically.

Input is given as one non-negative integer per line.

EXAMPLE

 psql bugs -A -t -c "
 select
     count(case when arch='amd64 (x86_64)' then 1 else null end)
     *80/count(*)
 from (select arch, date_trunc('month', timestamp) as month from si) m
 group by month
 order by month
 "|braillegraph

OPTIONS

-h, --horizontal

Horizontal layout. The Y axis is left-to-right, X axis is top-to-bottom.

-m, --max number

Force the target range of the data. Normally, the histogram will be auto-sized based on the largest value in the input; this option sets the max to a fixed value. It will result either in empty space on the graph or in values over the limit being hard-capped.

You typically want this option when comparing multiple histograms, or when continuously updating the display.

-y, --y-scale number

Scale the data so that the graph takes a given size (measured in dots) instead of varying on the data given. The size in characters is ¼ the dot size on a vertical graph, ½ on horizontal.

CAVEATS

Versions of FreeFont older than end of 2016 make any Braille glyphs (both for legitimate uses and for brailleimg) totally unreadable at pixel sizes commonly found in computer displays — ie, anything but HiDPI and/or very large text sizes. Alas, this font is commonly configured as primary fallback in default setups shipped by distributions.

AUTHOR

Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>