Make pie charts from text

pie Crew Roles Distribution

Sailors 45
Gunners 20
Marines 15
Officers 8
Specialists 7
Cooks & Surgeons 5

Overview

Splits one whole into proportional slices so relative share is immediately visible — “what share of the total is each?” Reach for it when you have a handful of categories that add up to a meaningful total: budget split, headcount by department, revenue by product. Hard precondition: your values must sum to something real. Every slice is labelled with its percentage of the summed total whether or not that total means anything, so feeding in numbers that don’t compose a whole (average rating by product, headcount and revenue side by side) invents a denominator and publishes fabricated percentages. If your numbers don’t sum to a whole, use bar.

When to use

• pie — your numbers add up to a meaningful 100% of one thing, and the share is the question.
• bar — you’re comparing sizes of things that don’t sum to anything, or anyone needs to read the individual numbers accurately.
• treemap — your categories contain sub-categories you also want sized.
• ring — each layer contains the one inside it rather than being a sibling splitting a total.
• polar-area — the question is “how big is each” on a common scale, with nothing being divided up.
• venn — one item can belong to two categories at once. Pie requires every item in exactly one slice.
• wordcloud — you only want a texture of which terms come up most, not exact proportions.

Syntax

pie Chart Title

Label value

Doughnut — hole

Add hole to render the pie as a doughnut ring. Use it bare, or with a ratio (hole 0.5) to set the inner-radius size. The value total is shown in the center by default — suppress it with no-center-total.

pie Crew Roles Distribution
hole

Sailors 45
Gunners 20
Marines 15
Officers 8
Specialists 7

The former standalone doughnut chart type was removed in 1.0 — use pie + hole.

Directives

The title is line 1 — there is no separate title directive.

Data Format

Each data line follows the pattern Label value:

Sailors 45
Gunners 20
Officers 8

Percentages are computed as each value over the sum of all values. That sum is assumed to be the whole — see the Overview before trusting it.

Appearance

Every chart accepts the universal appearance directives:

Colors come from the active palette — see Colors. Set the palette and light/dark theme at render time with --palette <name> and --theme light|dark|transparent.

Common mistakes

• A pie always reads as 100% of something. On categories that do not sum to a meaningful whole — average rating per product, headcount per unrelated team — the slices become percentages of a denominator that does not exist. Use bar when the categories are independent.
• The percentages are recomputed, not read. Three values of 30 each display as 33%. If you entered numbers you believed added to 100 and they did not, nothing says so — compare the rendered percentages against your source.
• A label ending in a digit swallows its value. Region 5 30 becomes a slice named Region 5 worth 30. Quote it: "Region 5" 30.
• Anything that renders but looks wrong: Troubleshooting is organised by symptom.

Next

• Related: bar · treemap · ring · polar-area · venn · wordcloud
• Then: Colors & palettes