graphing lifelines

[Larry Bates]

E. J. Gold is the Hi-Tech Shaman wrote:
> (crossposted to sci.math)
> 
> I'm looking for a tool which will take a dataset of tuples indicating
> the year of birth and death of a person:
> 
> (1872, 1950, "Sri Aurobindo")
> (1821, 1910, "Mary Baker Eddy")
> (1831, 1891, "HP. Blavatksy")
> 
> And graph them out, in bars, annotating them with the person's name.
> 
> A simple spreadsheet would've worked, but they seem to start from
> zero. Thus, I would only be able to indicate the span of life (by
> subtracting death year from birth year).

Certainly a "Hi-Tech Shaman" can whip something up to do this, right?

-Larry

P. S. you will need look for something like a high-low graph or do something 
custom.  I've used ReportLab's Graphing module quite effectively.  All depends 
on what format you want the output to be in.