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Side Labelled Pie Chart
Labelling pie charts is always difficult. If the data is dynamic, you will often end up with many labels crowded closely together, often in places a human designer wouldn't put them. The 'safe' approach has traditionally been to have a separate legend, and no text around the pie.
We have attempted to implement a semi-intelligent labelling system which appears to work in most cases. If the new 'sideLabels' attribute is set to true, then the labels of the slices are placed in two columns, one on either side of the pie. The start angle of the pie will be automatically chosen to try to get most of the slices "near the sides" rather than "near the top and bottom", to space the lines out.
You are still advised to preprocess your data so that the number of slices is limited - for example, grouping any slices less than 1-2% of the data into an 'other' category - as there is always a limit to how much text can stack up in a finite space.
The distance from the edge of the pie from the edge of either column is decided by the sideLabelsOffset attribute, which is a fraction of the width of the pie.
If xradius is changed, the pie can overlap the labels, and so we advise leaving xradius as None. If you have sideLabels set to True, then some of the attributes become redundant, such as pointerLabelMode. Also sideLabelsOffset only changes the label position if sideLabels is set to true.
from reportlab.graphics.charts.piecharts import Pie
from reportlab.graphics.shapes import Drawing, _DrawingEditorMixin
from reportlab.lib.colors import Color, magenta, cyan
class pietests(_DrawingEditorMixin,Drawing):
def __init__(self,width=400,height=200,*args,**kw):
Drawing.__init__(self,width,height,*args,**kw)
self._add(self,Pie(),name='pie',validate=None,desc=None)
self.pie.sideLabels = 1
self.pie.labels = ['Label 1', 'Label 2', 'Label 3', 'Label 4', 'Label 5']
self.pie.data = [20, 10, 5, 5, 5]
self.pie.width = 140
self.pie.height = 140
self.pie.y = 35
self.pie.x = 125