Easy Graph with Scruffy on Ruby

This weekend, I was going through the first chapter of the book Ruby in Practice. Kind of like it as of yet , although have read only 4-5 pages.

It shows an example of using the graphing library Scruffy. Thought to give it a try on my home PC (Vitsa).

This blog is to save your time, in case you want to use this nice library and run into configuration problem.

1. You need to install the "Scruffy" gems
gem install scruffy

2. Then I tried the example discussed at :- http://scruffy.rubyforge.org. However, was getting error, which made it clear, you need to install another gem - RMagick. Won't bother you with my trial and errors, so to cut long story short, RMagick in turn requires other graphing lib (for e.g., I opted for IMageMagick).

So, download http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/38052/RMagick-2.5.0-ImageMagick-6.4.1-5-Q8.zip

3. Extract this to a temp directory, and run the IMageMagick installer.

4. Follow the readme file, which mentions to update your gem and install the RMagick gem.

5.Now, the most important part. Reboot your machine [:)]. Don't forget it.

6.After this, the sample codes described here :- http://scruffy.rubyforge.org/ started to work, except the graphs being generated was exactly as it appears on this site (as of this writing, wonder why it hasn't been fixed ?), i.e. blank images.

7. One blog post which helped me to fix this was :- http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/193988
It suggests to replace the line 35, of the base.rb (for me it is C:\Ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\scruffy-0.2.6\lib\scruffy\renderers\base.rb)with

svg.svg(:xmlns => "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg", 'xmlns:xlink' =>"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink",:viewBox => "0 0 #{options[:size].first} #{options[:size].last}") {

After it, the graphs started working like a charm. Looking forward to explore it more. Hope, it saves your time.