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by martinsmit 1080 days ago
I switched permanently from Plots.jl to Makie.jl in order to have backend-agnostic fine-grained control. My publication plots look fantastic and the power given to users is really something. It also has a nicer API than Plots.jl once you get a hang of the figure, axis, plot distinction (plots live inside axes live inside figures) and what goes where.

Unfortunately, as with Plots, the documentation is lacking. The basic tutorial does a good job introducing the aspects of the package at a high level, but the fact that some parts of the documentation uses functions/structs that don't have docstrings in examples makes it very hard to build on the examples in these cases.

I get it, I can do anything with Makie, and most things that I want to do work amazingly. But my code for a single figure can get huge because it's all so low level. See, for example, the Legend documentation[1].

[1]: https://docs.makie.org/stable/examples/blocks/legend/index.h...

2 comments

Improving the docs as a key point was one of my takeaways from MakieCon. It's pretty time-intensive to work on them as you can imagine, but I hope we'll be able to make the structure more clear and efficient in the future. There should definitely at least be docstrings for every exported struct and so on. But I also want newcomers to get started with less friction, so the explanations/tutorials/how-tos must improve.

This is an easy way for newcomers to help out, by the way, just give feedback on how starting out with the library went and what the main roadblocks were. The better we understand them, the more we can improve them.

Polishing the Docs will be a big thing we want to do with better funding :) Improving APIs and recipes is the other big thing planned for this year.