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NAME

timeline - Program to draw an SVG timeline diagram from events defined in a file

SYNOPSIS

    $ timeline list_of_events.txt > timeline.svg

DESCRIPTION

A program to produce SVG timeline diagrams from events defined in a file.

This program reads data from a file given on the command line and writes an SVG document to STDOUT.

Input Data

The program reads input data from a tab-separated file. Each line in the file represents a single event in the timeline - which will be represented by a coloured rectangle in the diagram.

Each line in the file requires three columns of data: a text string (to be used as the label for the event), a start year and an end year. There can also be an optional fourth column which is a colour for the background of the rectangle representing the event. This colour can be a colour name (e.g. red) or an RGB string as recognised by SVG (e.g. rgb(255,0,0)).

An example input file might be:

    World War I 1914    1918
    World War II        1939    1945

Or, with colours included:

    World War I 1914    1918    red
    World War II        1939    1940    blue

Command Line Options

The program takes three command line options. This are all options.

years_per_grid

The number of years between grid lines in the output. The default value is ten, which gives a line every decade.

width

This will be inserted as the width attribute of the top-level SVG element in the output. The default is 100%.

height

This will be inserted as the height attribute of the top-level SVG element in the output. The default is 100%.

AUTHOR

Dave Cross <dave@perlhacks.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Copyright (c) 2017, Magnum Solutions Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.