IdeaSift

Data visualization authors fight defaults and fragile plot exports

Scientific plot authors and data-visualization developers need more control over chart layout, styling, and exported output than their libraries’ defaults make easy. They report laborious manual tweaking, slow callback-based workarounds, and cases where math labels are missing from SVG exports. The signals span different libraries and workflows, so a useful product would likely need to start with one ecosystem rather than promise a universal fix.

For scientific plot authors and data-visualization developers. Mentioned from Jun 2017 to May 2024 on GitHub and Hacker News.

4 different people described this problem in 4 separate discussions.

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Who pays
Professionals
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Medium
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Medium

What people said

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  1. My pet-peeve with matplotlib is the terrible layout of multiple plots on a grid. It's tedious (requires quite a bit of redundant typing), setting aspect ratios is tricky, getting margins right is an effort of trial and error -- setting reasonable font-sizes will almost certainly get you overlapping axes labels (especia…
    cycomanic on Hacker NewsNov 2023Has a workaround
  2. Users can also render KaTeX labels on plots with an extension, but since these are separate DOM elements, they are missing from the SVG export. We use canvas2svg to convert the plot canvas to SVG, and presumably if KaTeX could generate SVG as well, we could find a way to merge things together
    bryevdv on GitHub (KaTeX/KaTeX)Jun 2017Asked for a tool
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