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RELEASE-NOTES.md

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Plotters Release Notes

This documents contains the release notes for every major release since v0.3.

Plotters v0.3

Plotters v0.3 is shipped with multiple major improvements.

Plug-and-play backend importing

Introduction

Previously, Plotters implements all supported backend in the core crate. As the project is becoming bigger and bigger and more and more backend is supported, those backend implementation cause a huge mantainance burden.

For example, when cairo-rs crate is updated, plotters should release a new version with updated cairo-rs dependency for our cairo backend. However, most of the users doesn't actually use this backend and pushing new version for updating cairo backend seems to be annoying for most of the people. As more and more backend is added, the dependency is out of control.

Details

To address this, we are now move all backend implementation code out of the plotters crate. To use a specific backend, you need to explicitly add backend crate to your dependency. For example, to use bitmap backend for v0.2.x, we can do this

use plotters::prelude::*;
fn main() {
	let backend = BitMapBackend::new(...)
}

After this update, you should do the following code instead:

use plotters::prelude::*;
use plotter_bitmap::BitMapBackend; // <= This extra import is used to plug the backend to Plotters

fn main() {
	let backend = BitMapBackend::new(...)
}

Backward compatibility

Plotters 0.3 has introduced concept of tier 1 backends, which is the most supported. All tier 1 backends could be imported automatically with the core crate (But can be opt-out as well). Currently we have two tier 1 backends: plotters-bitmap and plotters-svg. These are used by most of the people.

To ease the upgrade for tier 1 backends, we still keep feature options in the core crate that can opt in those crates. And this is enabled by default.

Thus, if plotters is imported with default feature set, there would require no change. If the default feature set is opt out, then the following change should be make with your Crates.toml:

plotters = {version = "0.3", default-features = false, features = ["bitmap_backend", "svg_backend"]} # Instead of using feature "bitmap" and "svg"

For non tier 1 backends, manmually import is required (Please note tier on backends can be imported in same way). For example:

plotters = {version = "0.3", default-features = false} # Instead of having features = ["cairo"] at this point
plotters-cairo = "0.3" # We should import the cairo backend in this way.

And in your code, instead of import plotters::prelude::CairoBackend, you should import plotters_cairo::CairoBackend

Enhanced Coordinate System Abstraction

Details

Plotters 0.3 ships with tons of improvement made in the coordinate abstraction and support much more kinds of coordinate.

  • chrono::NaiveDate and chrono::NaiveDateTime are now supported
  • Better abstraction of discrete coordinates
  • Linspace coordinate, which can be used converting a continuous coorindate into a discrete buckets
  • Nested coordinate
  • Slices can now be used as cooradnite specification, which allows people define an axis of category.
  • 3D Coordinate is now supported

Fix bugs and improve testing