Plotly Orca

Plotly Orca implements the orca feature for Plotly for Rust

The orca feature enables Plot conversion to the following output formats: png, jpeg, webp, svg, pdf and eps.

Installation instructions

To use plotly_orca which is used by the orca feature for plotly, first you need to install the Orca command line utility.

Download the appropriate binary of Orca for your system from here.

Linux

Copy the orca--x86_64.AppImage anywhere in your home directory. Say you saved this in: /home/<user_name>/apps/orca--x86_64.AppImage Then simply create a symbolic link pointing to the AppImage:

chmod +x /home/<user_name>/apps/orca-<version>-x86_64.AppImage
sudo ln -s /home/<user_name>/apps/orca-<version>-x86_64.AppImage /usr/bin/plotly_orca

Note, it's important that the symbolic link is named exactly as shown above. The name of the link is not orca as there already exists an executable on RHEL 8 and Centos 8 with that name.

MacOSX

Install the dmg package. After that the orca binary will be detected by plotly_orca.

Windows

Run the installation executable with the default target path. After that plotly_orca will be able to find the orca.exe.

Examples

Once the Orca executable is installed you can give the feature a spin as follows:

extern crate plotly;
use plotly::common::Mode;
use plotly::{Plot, Scatter};

fn line_and_scatter_plot() {
    let trace1 = Scatter::new(vec![1, 2, 3, 4], vec![10, 15, 13, 17])
        .name("trace1")
        .mode(Mode::Markers);
    let trace2 = Scatter::new(vec![2, 3, 4, 5], vec![16, 5, 11, 9])
        .name("trace2")
        .mode(Mode::Lines);
    let trace3 = Scatter::new(vec![1, 2, 3, 4], vec![12, 9, 15, 12]).name("trace3");

    let mut plot = Plot::new();
    plot.add_trace(trace1);
    plot.add_trace(trace2);
    plot.add_trace(trace3);

    // The following will save the plot in all available formats and show the plot.
    plot.to_png("scatter", 1024, 680);
    plot.to_jpeg("scatter", 1024, 680);
    plot.to_webp("scatter", 1024, 680);
    plot.to_svg("scatter", 1024, 680);
    plot.to_pdf("scatter",1024, 680);
    plot.to_eps("scatter", 1024, 680);
    plot.show();
}

fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    line_and_scatter_plot();
    Ok(())
}

Note that Orca is not particularly fast; so it may take up to a second to produce an image; this performance is consistent with the Plotly package for Python which also uses Orca under the covers to rasterize plots. That said, it's still faster than the alternative manual approach.