Understanding Gantt Charts: Your Best Friend in Project Management

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by a project, you’re not alone. Keeping track of all the moving parts can be a real headache. That’s where Gantt charts come in! They’re like your project’s best buddy, helping you visualize tasks, timelines, and who’s doing what.

So, what is a Gantt chart? It’s a bar chart that shows a project schedule, with each task represented by a bar. The length of the bar indicates how long the task will take, and its position shows when it starts and ends.

Gantt charts offer visual clarity, making it easy to see what needs to be done and when. They help with better planning by highlighting potential bottlenecks and overlaps. Plus, if you’re working with a team, they keep everyone on the same page. As tasks get completed, you can update the chart to track progress and stay on track.

Creating Gantt Charts with Typst

Pintora, text-to-diagrams library, now includes Gantt chart generation. This development opens up new possibilities for project visualization using Typst and the library Pintorita.

Pintorita is a Typst package that simplifies the creation of various diagrams, including Gantt Diagrams. Its strength lies in its simple and intuitive syntax, making it easy for users to grasp and implement quickly.

With Pintorita, you can efficiently visualize complex project plans without the steep learning curve often associated with other tools. Below, the source that can be compiled to the figure shown in the video.

    #import "@preview/pintorita:0.1.4"
    #set page(width: auto, margin: 2em, flipped: true)
    #show raw.where(lang: "pintora"): it => pintorita.render(it.text)

    ```pintora
    gantt
         @param barHeight 40
          @config({
            "gantt": {
              "barBackground": "#BDAA00",
              "sectionBackgrounds": ["#ccdd77", "#EAF4AF", "#ccdd88","#EAF4AF"],
              "sectionLabelColor": "#0000CD",
               "markLineColor":  "#0000CD",
               "fontColor": "darkred"
            }
          })
      title Gantt Pintora

      dateFormat YYYY-MM-DDTHH
      axisFormat YY-MM-DD
      axisInterval 1w

      section Create YT Video
      "Video Content"       : t-a, 2025-2-17, 2025-2-23
      "Text to Speech"        : t-b, 2025-2-23, 2025-2-30

      %% the day I started typing the docs
      markDate 2025-3-15T20

      section Documentation
      "Write Blog Post"          : t-c, 2025-3-03, 15d

      section Optimize
      "Content Optimization" : 2025-3-28, 2025-4-04

      section Release
      "Release" : milestone, 2025-4-06, 1d
```

Another valuable Typst library is Gannty, which specializes in generating professional-looking Gantt charts. Unlike Pintorita, Gannty requires users to serialize the data for the chart in a YAML format, which can add a layer of complexity for those unfamiliar with YAML syntax.

To assist users in this process, we have developed a JSON validator schema that can be utilized in Vim with the YAML COC language server. This tool helps verify the YAML file, providing indications of any errors, ensuring that users can create accurate and effective Gantt charts with confidence.

The YAML data file below includes a comment line at the top that specifies the URL for the JSON schema, which the data file must adhere to in order to be considered valid.

To simplify schema creation, genjsonschema—a command-line tool for generating JSON Schemas from YAML—was used.

Beginning with the YAML example in the Gannty repository, the JSON Schema validator was generated with the following CLI command:

   genjsonschema-cli.exe create -o gantt.json .\gantt.yaml

To use this schema validator in your Gantt chart, include the first comment line from the YAML file shown below.

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://tessarinseve.pythonanywhere.com/staticweb/gantt.json

    show-today: true
    viewport-snap: day
    headers:
      - year
      - month
      - week
      - day
    start: 2024-11-01
    end: 2025-03-31
    taskgroups:
      - name: Requirements Gathering
        tasks:
          - name: Requirements Gathering
            start: 2024-11-01
            end: 2024-11-10
            done: 2024-11-08
      - name: Design
        tasks:
          - name: Create MVP
            start: 2024-11-11
            end: 2024-11-25
          - name: Review MVP
            start: 2024-11-26
            end: 2024-12-01
      - name: Development
        tasks:
          - name: Frontend Development
            start: 2024-12-02
            end: 2025-01-01
          - name: Backend Development
            start: 2025-01-02
            end: 2025-01-31
      - name: Testing
        tasks:
          - name: Unit Testing
            start: 2025-02-01
            end: 2025-02-10
          - name: User Acceptance Testing
            start: 2025-02-11
            end: 2025-02-20
      - name: Deployment
        tasks:
          - name: Deploy to Production
            start: 2025-02-21
            end: 2025-02-25
    milestones:
      - name: MVP Complete
        date: 2024-11-10
      - name: Design Complete
        date: 2024-12-01
      - name: Development Complete
        date: 2025-01-31
      - name: Testing Complete
        date: 2025-02-20
      - name: Project Launch
        date: 2025-02-25