# Can Gadfly plot 3D surface charts......?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/can-gadfly-plot-3d-surface-charts/7272>\
**Category:** Offtopic\
**Created:** [November 23, 2017, 2:48pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/can-gadfly-plot-3d-surface-charts/7272 "2017-11-23T14:48:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mikefot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9de053/32.png) [@mikefot](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mikefot)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2017, 2:48pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/can-gadfly-plot-3d-surface-charts/7272/1 "2017-11-23T14:48:03Z")

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Dear Juliaists,

I installed Julia and Gadfly correctly on Windows 10 (I run a kaveri box amd64 machine).

My question is not about Julia hence I chose the offtopic section.

I looked at the Gadfly documentation which is helpful.

It is clear on how you plot things and how you read in the data (e.g. from an Rdataset file or a file made by the Rdataset utility in R) etc. I have R installed on this machine and I can look up Rdataset on it and make it work.

In the example plots I can see 2D charts with sets of x and y coordinates.

E…g. the set (1,1) ,(2,2), (3,3), (4,4), (5.5) should give a straight line going through the origin with a slope of 1.

Or something like that.

BUT

Can Gadly plot what is termed a 3D surface chart.

Like this one:

> **[3D Surface plots](https://plotly.com/scala/3d-surface-plots/)**
>
> How to create surface plots in Plotly with Scala.

or this:

 ![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/5/b/5b801ed66e2a082c92f635b87a783ac80eb555d3.jpeg)

Can it do this or should I go for pyqtgraph instead?

I think you need to use numpy and csvread or something to enter data from data file into pyqtgraph as far as I  
can see…

May be there is an alternative way to one of the widget things from Qt Designer or from pyqtgraph itself but it is a bit cryptic trying to figure that out for me at present.

Comments appreciated.

Michael Fothergill

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ChrisRackauckas](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/chrisrackauckas/32/77_2.png) [@ChrisRackauckas](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ChrisRackauckas)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2017, 7:57pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/can-gadfly-plot-3d-surface-charts/7272/2 "2017-11-23T19:57:40Z")

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> [@mikefot](#):
>
> Can it do this or should I go for pyqtgraph instead?

Gadfly can’t do it, but it’s not a good show of what Julia plotting libraries can do at all. Plots.jl can do it, and so can PyPlot.jl. You’ll get a lot more mileage out of those. I’d suggest giving Plots.jl a try.