I have recently discovered that simple Venn diagrams are surprisingly popular in bioinformatics. So popular they are, in fact, that there are several bioinformatics research papers devoted solely to their use. And those are highly accessed papers, let me add! Yet, despite this wild popularity, tools that let you render a decent Venn diagram programmatically seem to be rather scarce.
Vennerable plot
If you google a bit, you will find a bunch of on-line tools of varying degrees of quality and ability (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,...), a Java-based tool, a Perl library, a couple of Python scripts (1, 2), some R libraries (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and lots of forum discussions. Seems to be plenty, doesn't it? Well, it turns out that if you want your diagram to be area-weighted (i.e. the regions of the diagram should be roughly proportional to the corresponding set sizes), 4 of those 18 links won't do. If you want to generate and configure the diagram conveniently from a script, drop another 9. Then, if you want the diagram to look nice, drop 4 more, and all you are left with is the Vennerable R package. Unfortunately, Vennerable plots are still a pain to configure — even adding a plot title seems to be very tricky, not speaking of highlighting and annotating a region on the diagram.
Having been totally disappointed in the state of the art of contemporary Venn-diagramming tools, I made a small Python package for drawing Venn diagrams that has the necessary flexibility. At least it lets me put plot titles and annotate diagram regions as I fancy.
Matplotlib-venn plot
Package installation goes by the standard method: easy_install matplotlib-venn
For basic usage examples, consult the PyPI page.
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