[WanderPanda]

So be fair, sometimes (e.g. in the case of scatter plots with many dots) pdf renderers become very slow and/or mess up the rendering. In this case the easiest option is rasterizing it (for performance and consistency of the appearance)

[V1ndaar]

That is certainly true (and why added a general "embed plot data as bitmap into SVG/PDF" option to https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim that works not only for raster heatmaps). But realistically such plots are often not ideal anyway (too many data points in a plot is often a sign that a different type of plot would be better; typically one that aggregates in some way) and it's just another argument to make the data for plots available as well.

[jszymborski]

If you have the misfortune of having to use Word for writing manuscripts and/or have scatter plots with a good number of points, SVGs will ruin your day in my experience.

(Yes, I'd much rather use LaTeX)