Building a bar chart

A classic way of displaying categories with corresponding values is a bar chart. It consists of rectangular bars, and they are proportional to the represented values. The main purpose is to visually compare those values.

We will draw a chart visualizing web forum statistics.

How to do it...

We will use the pgfplots package. It's for natively plotting in LaTeX with a convenient user interface. We will use it to produce a horizontal bar chart.

Perform these steps:

1. Start with a document class:

   \documentclass{article} 

2. Load the pgfplots package:

   \usepackage{pgfplots}
   \pgfplotsset{width=7cm,compat=1.8}

3. Begin the document:

   \begin{document}

4. Begin a TikZ picture, which will be the container for the plot:

   \begin{tikzpicture}

5. Open an axis environment:

     \begin{axis}

6. Give options to the axis:

    [
       title    = Contributions per category
                  at LaTeX-Community.org,
       xbar,
       y axis line style = { opacity = 0 },
       axis x line       = none,
       tickwidth         = 0pt,
       enlarge...