[NTG-context] Charts, Graphs, Tufte, and ConTeXt

[David Wooten]

Greetings all,

I've been itching to stop using "Illustrator" and other programs to make 
the charts and graphs I wish to include in my ConTeXt-generated 
documents, and would like to get some advice on the matter.

There is a special (albeit not well furnished) place in my heart for 
Tufte's /"Visual Display of Quantitative Information/", so I suppose I 
am always leaning towards that philosophy of chart-making. I came across 
Jean-luc Doumont's article /"Drawing effective (and beautiful) graphs 
with TeX*" [1]/, in which he refers to his macro package called 
JLdraw---and shows some pretty examples. JLdraw was in fact never 
generally released, although when I contacted him he was happy to send 
along the macro package. In beginning to tinker with them, I have not 
had much luck getting them to work within ConTeXt, undoubtedly due to my 
persistent naiveté.

Thus I'm curious as to what others use... is R an efficient method to 
produce elegant charts? Is straight MetaPost preferable?

Many thanks,
David

[1] http://www.tug.org/TUG99-web/pdf/doumont2.pdf