About

papyri is small, focused data visualization library based on cairo-rs. Its primary purpose is to offer seamless plotting capabilities to Rust-based GTK applications. It supports line, scatter, bar, interval, area and label "mappings", which are graphical representations of quantitative data. The generated plots can be exported to svg, png and eps, therefore it is also suited as a stand-alone visualization library targeted at printed documents or web-pages.

Design

papyri is based on a strong separation between plot definition and rendering. papyri::model is responsible to build plot models. Those are loosely-typed, serializable data structures that can be used to interface with high-level applications such as the command-line tool that reads and renders from a plot JSON definition, or programming environments based on dynamic languages. If you have a client-server architecture and the client application only needs to build plot definitions (and is not concerned with rendering) you only need to use this module. All structures there offer easy-to-use builder-like patterns to construct plot definitions. The definition can be serialized to JSON to be built from the command-line or a server application.

If the library is compiled with the features "gdk", "gdk-pixbuf" and "cairo-rs", then the papyri::render module is exported as well. This can be used by a server or the application directly to actually render the plots. Note that cairo and the glib framework are system dependencies for renderization. You can easily render into a cairo surface if you are working on a GTK application (using the DrawingArea widget) or you can export plots directly.