Choosing a plotting library

General Usage
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21

Linking PlotlyLight.jl announcement.

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22

just as much as I struggle to use Makie for simple things, I also really struggle to use matplotlib for complicated things. I don’t think it’s totally fair to call it low quality in comparison, they just have different strengths. no pain no gain

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23

This is because Plots.jl does not have (and will never have) the same amount of information as the native backend. In this case, Plots.jl does not know about the window size that the plot will be displayed in. It will produce an image with the default size and pass that to the display, whatever that is.

EDIT:
Though the real problem here is having a static figure size to begin with, but thats a not so easy to solve problem.

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24

Yeah, I don’t think other languages have an ecosystem similar to Plots. So that one can use the same code to make plots with very different backend libraries - and this works fine for basic plots.
It’s not clear IMO whether this is actually needed, compared to a few separate plotting libraries that have all the native information they need (eg matplotlib, Makie, gnuplot, VegaLite, etc), and each with its fundamental (dis)advantages. But still, Plots in Julia is a pretty unique example of what’s possible.

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I totally agree with this. Matplotlib, be it in Python or through PyPlot.jl is very simple for basic plots but when you need to customize, it is endless workaround code. Makie is simpler to use for complex plots imho.

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I am wondering if you can change the title of this thread to make in easier for searching. Something like “Optimum Julia Plotting Library”. There is good information that should be easy to find.

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27

I have looked for the ability to use Datatips in Gnuplot and have not been able to find out how.

28

Certainly nothing as fancy as Matlab, but you can get the mouse coordinates and you can annotate points with mouse middle-click:

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29

In the meantime 2, 3 and 4 are supported in GR. See How to achieve better interactivity with GR | The GR Framework Blog

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30

Perhaps this is also of interest in this context: I’ve done a comparison of several Julia graphics packages which are based on the Grammar of Graphics (like ggplot) and published the comparison on towardsdatascience.com in a series of articles. Up to now the following articles are available (including Pluto notebooks with the examples presented):

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31

It’s not a pure Julia solution but PlotJuggler is a really excellent tool that is worth considering for some use cases.

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