# Tucan
[](https://github.com/pnezis/tucan/actions)
[](https://hex.pm/packages/tucan)
[](https://hexdocs.pm/tucan/Tucan.html)
`Tucan` is an Elixir plotting library built on top of `VegaLite`, designed to simplify
the creation of interactive and visually stunning plots. With `Tucan`, you can effortlessly
generate a wide range of plots, from simple bar charts to complex composite plots, all
while enjoying the power and flexibility of a clean composable functional API.
`Tucan` offers a simple API for creating most common plot types similarly to `matplotlib`
and `seaborn` without requiring the end user to be familiar with the Vega Lite grammar.
## Features
- **Versatile Plot Types** - `Tucan` provides an array of plot types, including bar charts,
line plots, scatter plots, histograms, and more, allowing you to effectively represent
diverse data sets.
- **Clean and consistent API** - A clean and consistent plotting API similar to `matplotlib`
or `seaborn` is provided. You should be able to create most common plots with a single
function call and minimal configuration.
- **Grouping and Faceting** - Enhance your visualizations with grouping and faceting
features, enabling you to examine patterns and trends within subgroups of your data.
- **Customization** - Customize your plots with ease using Tucan's utilities for adjusting
plot dimensions, titles, and **themes**.
- **Thin wrapper on top of VegaLite** - All `VegaLite` functions can be used seamlessly with
`Tucan` in order to enhance/customize your plots.
- **Low level API** - A low level API with helper functions is provided for modifying
`VegaLite` specifications.
## Basic usage
```elixir
# A simple scatter plot
Tucan.scatter(:iris, "petal_width", "petal_length")
# You can combine it with one or more semantic grouping functions
Tucan.scatter(:iris, "petal_width", "petal_length")
|> Tucan.color_by("species")
|> Tucan.shape_by("species")
# You can pipe it through other Tucan functions to modify the look & feel
Tucan.bubble(:gapminder, "income", "health", "population",
color_by: "region",
tooltip: true
)
|> Tucan.set_width(400)
|> Tucan.Axes.set_x_title("Gdp per Capita")
|> Tucan.Axes.set_y_title("Life expectancy")
|> Tucan.Scale.set_x_scale(:log)
# Some composite plots are also supported
fields = ["petal_width", "petal_length", "sepal_width", "sepal_length"]
Tucan.pairplot(:iris, , width: 130, height: 130)
|> Tucan.color_by("species", recursive: true)
# creating facet plots is very easy with the facet_by/4 function
Tucan.scatter(:iris, "petal_width", "petal_length")
|> Tucan.facet_by(:column, "species")
|> Tucan.color_by("species")
```
Read the [docs](https://hexdocs.pm/tucan/Tucan.html) for more examples.
## Installation
### Inside Livebook
You most likely want to use Tucan in [Livebook](https://github.com/livebook-dev/livebook),
in which case you can call `Mix.install/2`:
```elixir
Mix.install([
{:tucan, "~> 0.2.1"},
{:kino_vega_lite, "~> 0.1.8"}
])
```
You will also want [kino_vega_lite](https://github.com/livebook-dev/kino_vega_lite) to ensure
Livebook renders the graphics nicely.
### In Mix projects
You can add the `:tucan` dependency to your `mix.exs`:
```elixir
def deps do
[
{:tucan, "~> 0.2.1"}
]
end
```
**NOTE:** While I will try to maintain backwards compatibility as much as possible, since this
is still a 0.x.x project the API is not considered stable and thus subject to possible breaking
changes up until v1.0.0.
## Acknowledgements
- [vega-lite](https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/) and the awesome docs of it, many examples
and most of the datasets used are based on it.
- The elixir [VegaLite](https://github.com/livebook-dev/vega_lite) bindings
- [seaborn](https://seaborn.pydata.org/), [matplotlib](https://matplotlib.org/) and
[ggplot2](https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/) upon which the high level API is partially based.
- [vega-themes](https://github.com/vega/vega-themes) from which the existing themes are
ported.
## License
Copyright (c) 2023 Panagiotis Nezis
Tucan is released under the MIT License. See the [LICENSE](LICENSE) file for more details.
