plot topography

[likanzhan]

No description provided.

[Tokazama]

Looks like a good place to start. We should update the project.toml file if we add dependencies

[palday]

Looks great! I've got some comments to help transition it from "user code" to "package code"

[palday]

only depend on Makie for top-level package stuff and let the user load their preferred backend

[palday]

This method should probably be made internal (_plot_topography) and instead plot_topography should take a Tables.jl table.

(I'll help do this when I get a few minutes)

[palday]

original license here appears to be BSD-3, may need to add more license-related documentation at the method definition

[palday]

should probably convert these constants to Tables.jl table, where each row is channel name + coordinates

[Tokazama]

Or even just a NamedTuple. It might make sense to have a formal ElectrodeTemplate type at some point that is a table.

EDIT:
Actually, it would probably be good to have something like ROITable with optionally 2d or 3d coordinates. We can then add networks on top of that in the future, treating it like plotted graph. But that level of detail may be outside the scope of this PR.

[likanzhan]

For now, I stored it as a named tuple.

[Tokazama]

Thanks for this, @likanzhan. You're awesome!

@palday, since you have experience with plotting packages, what's your advice on testing here?

[palday]

@likanzhan and @Tokazama

The "best" way is to use something like Percy that does visual testing, so that you know if your plots change. But that takes a bit of effort and potentially a paid account, and I haven't done for my plotting packages yet, so I can't help do it quickly.

The next best way is a combination of two things:

1. writing out the plots (e.g. with CairoMakie.save) to some temp dir during the normal tests stage just to make sure the code runs and doesn't error. You have to write the figure out to file because a lot doesn't happen until the figure is actually drawn.
2. Having good docs where a few sample plots are displayed, so that you can also do quick visual checks on new plots to see if they look like you expect (and to see if some figures fail to render).

The combination of these two things are generally enough to get an impression about the state of the package and detect e.g. if a Makie version bump breaks anything.

[Tokazama]

That's super helpful. Thank you.

I'm going to go ahead and merge this so we can incrementally build on this.

[jrevels]

The "best" way is to use something like Percy that does visual testing, so that you know if your plots change. But that takes a bit of effort and potentially a paid account, and I haven't done for my plotting packages yet, so I can't help do it quickly.

(cc @SimonDanisch who has been interested in developing an OSS/Julia-developer-friendly alternative to Percy for Makie + Julia ecosystem :) good to know there are use cases here)