6 Data Visualization with Makie.jl

Makie.jl is a high-performance, extendable, and multi-platform plotting ecosystem for the Julia programming language. In our opinion, it is the prettiest and most powerful plotting package.

Makie.jl deals with arrays (Section ), such as vectors and matrices. This makes Makie.jl capable of dealing with any tabular data and especially DataFrames as we covered in Section 4.

There are three main backends which concretely implement all abstract rendering capabilities defined in Makie. These are

.

In this book we will only show examples for CairoMakie.jl and GLMakie.jl.

You can activate any backend by using the appropriate package and calling its activate! function. For example:

or

For png’s you specify px_per_unit. See Exporting a Figure with physical dimensions for details.

Another important issue is to actually visualize your output plot. Note that for CairoMakie.jl the Julia REPL is not able to show plots, so you will need an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) such as VSCode, Jupyter or Pluto that supports png or svg as output. On the other hand, GLMakie.jl can open interactive windows, or alternatively display bitmaps inline if is called.