Introducing plotly.py 3.0.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing plotly.py 3.0.0

#11

Post by kugestu » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 9:38 PM UTC

Really good stuff and addresses many issues I had, eg documentation and jupyter compatibility. I hope the static image export gets a bit streamlined - being able to quickly & programmatically export graphs to png is really something I did not find easy from python with plotly so far. Yet it is definitely crucial eg to send a high quality image to the boss for a PowerPoint slide or to save 100s of png images for quick visual quality checks.

So I am really looking forward to give the new version a spin!

Re: Introducing plotly.py 3.0.0

#12

Post by peatmoss » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

Plotly for R has the neat feature whereby you can take a ggplot plot and render it with plotly. Same definition; perhaps more web-appropriate output. I think if I were to try and extend a grammar of graphics plotting system for another language, I might start with Plotly... or perhaps vega-lite.

Re: Introducing plotly.py 3.0.0

#13

Post by jmmease » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 10:47 PM UTC

kugestu wrote: post #11

Really good stuff and addresses many issues I had, eg documentation and jupyter compatibility. I hope the static image export gets a bit streamlined - being able to quickly & programmatically export graphs to png is really something I did not find easy from python with plotly so far. Yet it is definitely crucial eg to send a high quality image to the boss for a PowerPoint slide or to save 100s of png images for quick…

Rock solid export of high-quality static images is really important to me too. Fortunately the hard part is already done (in orca). Integrating orca into plotly.py is the very next feature I'm going to start working on after I get through SciPy next week, so hopefully it won't be too much longer...

Re: Introducing plotly.py 3.0.0

#14

Post by ggm » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 12:25 AM UTC

I use plotly to make SVG outcomes which then help show people things moving to pptx. The nice thing about the plotly svg is how well its written: it works perfectly as the icon form or the real view. (its also significantly nicer than the analogous design elements inside powerpoint, but I can't take people direct to SVG elements on projected things at meetings just yet)

brilliant, simple to use s/w. thank you.

Re: Introducing plotly.py 3.0.0

#15

Post by joshvm » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 2:11 AM UTC

lorenzfx wrote: post #10

I really like plotly, but I'm wondering if anyone has some experience with plotly AND with some other interactive plotting libraries for python (e.g., bokeh or altair). Where are the strengths and weaknesses? Which package to you prefer?

It seems that the new version of plotly addresses most of my annoyances, but I've yet to play with it.

I really like Bokeh. It's still quite young (0.13) and some things aren't quite there yet. For general plotting, pretty much everything you need is already there. The documentation is excellent.

Plotly is very powerful, but if you have a use-case that's beyond the examples it can be hard to find. I ran into some annoying issues - for example you can't embed JSON metadata into a plot before sending to the browser because the parser can't deal with unexpected keys.

I also don't (didn't?) like how everything in Plotly is done via dictionaries and (for the newcomer, somewhat abstract) graph objects. Graph object definitions in plotly get very busy and long if you need to do anything complicated. The new imperative options seem to have fixed this.

Bokeh feels much more similar to Matplotlib and I think produces far more readable code.

Re: Introducing plotly.py 3.0.0

#16

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:22 AM UTC

jmmease wrote: post #6

minimaxir wrote: post #5

I did a dataviz livestream yesterday where a couple people asked if they should learn d3 for interactive data visualization. I strongly suggested using plotly instead (either this Python API or the R/ggplot2 API) as it saved a lot of headaches. The native Notebook capabilities are very nice too. (the hard part is extracting the interactive visualization to use elsewhere)

Cool! Here are a few ways to get the interactive visualizations elsewhere (outside of the notebook). 1) You can save them to a standalone, self-contained, html file: See https://community.plot.ly/t/proper-way-to-save-a-plot-to-htm... 2) You can save them to an html element and embed them in another web page: See https://stackoverflow.com/a/38032952/4551895 3) You can upload them to plot.ly and share the link

[deleted]

Re: Introducing plotly.py 3.0.0

#17

Post by mkl » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:56 AM UTC

jmmease wrote: post #13

kugestu wrote: post #11

Really good stuff and addresses many issues I had, eg documentation and jupyter compatibility. I hope the static image export gets a bit streamlined - being able to quickly & programmatically export graphs to png is really something I did not find easy from python with plotly so far. Yet it is definitely crucial eg to send a high quality image to the boss for a PowerPoint slide or to save 100s of png images for quick…

Rock solid export of high-quality static images is really important to me too. Fortunately the hard part is already done (in orca). Integrating orca into plotly.py is the very next feature I'm going to start working on after I get through SciPy next week, so hopefully it won't be too much longer...

That's a really hard name to search for! I found it: https://github.com/plotly/orca

Re: Introducing plotly.py 3.0.0

#18

Post by oretoz » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 5:46 AM UTC

ggm wrote: post #14

I use plotly to make SVG outcomes which then help show people things moving to pptx. The nice thing about the plotly svg is how well its written: it works perfectly as the icon form or the real view. (its also significantly nicer than the analogous design elements inside powerpoint, but I can't take people direct to SVG elements on projected things at meetings just yet) brilliant, simple to use s/w. thank you.

Do you have an example writeup of how you used Plotly output in PPT? I would be very interested to learn that. Thank

Re: Introducing plotly.py 3.0.0

#19

Post by kugestu » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:19 AM UTC

ggm wrote: post #14

I use plotly to make SVG outcomes which then help show people things moving to pptx. The nice thing about the plotly svg is how well its written: it works perfectly as the icon form or the real view. (its also significantly nicer than the analogous design elements inside powerpoint, but I can't take people direct to SVG elements on projected things at meetings just yet) brilliant, simple to use s/w. thank you.

Good suggestion! Unfortunately I found SVG in ppt problematic/slow when plotting many objects (think 1mio points) and sometimes details can be messed up - so rendering to bitmaps is still preferred.

Re: Introducing plotly.py 3.0.0

#20

Post by xioxox » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 8:24 AM UTC

kugestu wrote: post #19

ggm wrote: post #14

I use plotly to make SVG outcomes which then help show people things moving to pptx. The nice thing about the plotly svg is how well its written: it works perfectly as the icon form or the real view. (its also significantly nicer than the analogous design elements inside powerpoint, but I can't take people direct to SVG elements on projected things at meetings just yet) brilliant, simple to use s/w. thank you.

Good suggestion! Unfortunately I found SVG in ppt problematic/slow when plotting many objects (think 1mio points) and sometimes details can be messed up - so rendering to bitmaps is still preferred.

You could try Veusz [1], which can export in EMF format, which is useful for Microsoft Office and Powerpoint. (I am the lead author of Veusz)

[1] https://veusz.github.io/