📈`lilaq:0.2.0` − Plotting and scientific data visualization

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The version 0.2.0 just dropped :bar_chart::)
You can find the documentation at https://lilaq.org/.

With this release, important improvements are made to the defaults, prominently including a new default color cycle.

Feedback on the default settings are welcome! Defaults are important because they are often left unchanged by the user − currently, Lilaq is in a stage where defaults can still be tuned. Later, such breaking changes will be mostly impossible.
You can open a Discussion on GitHub and share your thoughts there.

Instead of a somewhat arbitrary color cycle, Lilaq now uses a thoroughly researched, highly optimized color sequence that is friendly to people with color deficiencies. This map is a result of the work of M. A. Petroff ([2107.02270] Accessible Color Sequences for Data Visualization).

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On top, Lilaq ships a small set of color sequences, available under lq.color.map.

Moreover, the default axis thickness and tick length have been reduced, resulting in a better harmony with text surrounding a diagram figure.

The mark shapes of Lilaq are carefully designed to match in optical size, so they look good together in one plot without further adaptation. This release makes some fine adjustments to the mark sizes. Furthermore, some marks have been added and a few ones renamed (see below).

The most important fixes in this release concern a bug that made it impossible to replace the default style cycle and an issue when first-line-indent was applied to all paragraphs.

Changelog

Highlights

  • Lilaq now features a professional default color cycle.

Added

  • plot.every for plotting marks for only a subset of the data points.
  • Sequential color maps, e.g., for style cycles under lq.color.map.
  • Tools for creating cycles.
  • Options tip and toe to lq.path for adding arrow tips or other marks.

Improved

  • diagram.xaxis and diagram.yaxis dictionaries will now fold which is useful for set rules and overriding only specific settings made in templates.
  • axis.dx and axis.dy can now be of type relative or ratio for more positioning control.
  • Ticks now use cap: "butt" by default leading to better results when the spine stroke is set to none. This also shortens the ticks by half their width compared to before.
  • The function locate-ticks-linear now features a parameter density that can be used to tune the number of generated ticks based on the automatic estimate.
  • The parameter label.pad can now be none for placement directly on the axis (ignoring the ticks).
  • diagram.cycle can now also take an array of colors for the common case that the style cycle only consists of color changes. Moreover, and array of dictionaries with the possible keys color, stroke, and mark is supported.

Marks

  • Tweaked mark sizes.
  • :warning: Replaced triangle with ^ and added other triangle rotations <, >, and v.
  • :warning: Replaced diamond with d
  • :warning: Replaced pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, and octagon with p5, p6, p7, p8.
  • Added star variations s3, s4, s5, and s6
  • :warning: Default mark stroke thickness is now 0.7pt instead of 1pt matching it with the default line width of 0.7pt.

Other breaking changes

  • :warning: The default color cycle has changed. We now use a color sequence introduced by Matthew A. Petroff in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.02270 that is optimized for distinguishability, aesthetics, and people with color deficiencies.
  • :warning: The default spine thickness has changed from 0.7pt to 0.5pt.
  • :warning: The default tick length has been reduced from 4pt to 3pt.
  • :warning: diagram.legend no longer supports bool arguments. Instead, use legend: none to turn the legend off (or legend: (:) to turn it back on after it has been deactivated previously).
  • :warning: The default color of vlines and hlines is now black instead of blue.

Fixed

  • An urgent bug with style cycle lists being appended.
  • The bottom axis being misplaced when a first-line-indent is applied to all paragraphs.
  • Combination of plot.stroke: none and a fixed plot.color resulted in black error bars.

Documentation

  • Added examples for advanced bar charts with labels and error bars.
  • Added mark documentation and tutorial.
  • Improved style cycle documentation.
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