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I have used R/ggplot for a long time now, and it's exceedingly difficult to produce beautiful visualizations. The only thing that makes tufte-quality visualiza
by sciboy 16y ago
I have used R/ggplot for a long time now, and it's exceedingly difficult to produce beautiful visualizations.
The only thing that makes tufte-quality visualizations in my experience is hand-building your graphs in tikz.
The graphs you linked to are hideous from an aesthetics point of view; font's are ugly, data:ink ratio far too low, color choices poor etc.
- wwortiz 16y agoEspecially when you have such pretty defaults in things like Matlab and Mathematica. Matplotlib (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/ http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/) is actually the best opensource library for creating great looking graphs that I have come across, and is comparable to Matlab and Mathematica.
- cdavid 16y agoI guess taste comes in place - I find producing good (as in academic publication good) figures in matlab an exercice of pain. The subplot mechanism is awful (at least was 5 years ago), and it is hard to control the layout. I heard mathematic is much better in that regard, but never used it myself.
- sciboy 16y agoI've looked at matplotlib but still think it's ugly by default. Compare to: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/weather-stations-data/ http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/weather-stations-data/ http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/rna-codons-table/ http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/rna-codons-table/ The beauty of tex font's + vector graphics is impressive. Try zooming in on the sparklines in the first example