Various features (some simple, some more challenging)

[papamarkou]

I like Gadfly a lot, only started using it yesterday. Being not so familiar with it, there were several features I wondered if they are available, so please excuse my lack of knowledge if some of the features I mention below are present in the package. As a user, I identified some functionality that may be useful to (me and) other users too. Rather than opening several separate tickets, I thought I may provide a list below with the desired features to find out which ones may be available, which ones are easy to code and which ones would need a lot of work. So here is the list:

1. Transparent background; is it easy to set panel_fill to transparent (rather than white)?
2. Specify style (symbol) for plotting points (similear to R's pch option).
3. Specify style of black-coloured lines (dotted, dashed, dotted-dashed, apart from solid).
4. Use of basic LaTeX (subscripts, superscripts etc) for annotation in labels and legends (this may already be available).
5. Saving in JPG format.
6. 3D plots (I guess the last two are somewhat more challenging).

This is a very broad issue, mostly asking which of these are easier to add.

[dcjones]

Thanks for this, these are good suggestions.

1. There's not a background transparency option, but trivial to add.
2. Not very hard. I'd just want to do a little research on good shapes to use first.
3. Not very hard, and overdo. There's been an open issue for several months: Dashed (and other types of) lines Compose.jl#35
4. You can do super/subscripts now like x<sup>2</sup> or x<sub>2</sub>. I'd like to add full LaTeX formula support, but I don't know the best way to do that that would work consistently across backends.
5. JPEG support is a medium sized project. Writing libjpeg bindings and hooking it up to cairo would be the easiest way to go about it. It's not a high priority for most people, I suspect.
6. I want to tackle 3D plots eventually. It's quite a big project though since drawing and interacting with 3D plots is so different than 2D plots.

[papamarkou]

Thanks for the detailed reply Daniel. It is pleasing to hear that 1-4 are relatively easy to add with varying levels of difficulty, since I think many users will benefit from them. I agree with you that 5 (jpeg support) is much lower priority. Yes, 6 can be a longer term goal (I suspected it is not a trivial task).

[papamarkou]

Hi Daniel, I noticed that you already implemented point (1) above in your commit 0885954, thank you very much for doing this. I wanted your help on how to use the panel_opacity option that you added; if you could provide a very naive example, it would be very much appreciated.

[dcjones]

Hi Theodore. Sorry for not following up on this. If you simply add Theme(panel_opacity=0.0) you can make the background invisible. You can also do Theme(panel_fill=nothing) (which is actually the default now), or Theme(panel_fill=color("grey")), etc.

I'm trying to triage issues any these sorts of meta-issues are hard to keep track of so I'm going to split this into separate issues and close this one:

1. Fixed.
2. Aesthetics based on shape #66
3. Dashed Lines #392
4. MathJax/LaTeX/Some sort of thing like that for labels/titles #356
5. Non-PNG bitmap formats Compose.jl#104
6. 3D Plots #520

[papamarkou]

Hi @dcjones, I just noticed by accident your latest reply and that you have followed up with this. Thank you very much :)

[papamarkou]

Sure, feel free to close this one, I agree with you that it is better to break it down to sub-issues, which you have done already.