Plotly’s powerful, web-based online chart creator, Chart Studio, got a major upgrade last week with the release of our brand new chart editor. It is accessible for free at https://plot.ly/create. This milestone caps over a year of work by our development team and captures more than half a decade’s worth of learning and feedback about user interfaces for creating and editing charts online.
We rebuilt the editor from the ground up so as to provide improved usability, while exposing more of the capabilities of our world-famous plotly.js open-source graphing library. Every panel has been carefully redesigned to maximize usability and control over every aspect of your chart: grouping related items together, only showing applicable options and providing a consistent interface to every feature.
New Features and Improvements
- New trace types which have been recently added to plotly.js are now available in the editor: violin plots, polar scatter plots, cone plots, and streamtubes
- Subplot controls are more powerful than ever, allowing drag-and-drop placement and the ability mix and match subplots of any trace type, so if (for whatever reason) you want a map next to a ternary chart above a 3-D surface plot… you can do that!
- Our JSON editor now includes a color-picker, undo-redo capabilities and more powerful schema validation.
- Our colorscale picker now includes perceptually uniform colorscales and color-blind-accessible colorscales, as well as all the other colorscales you know and love from matplotlib, ColorBrewer and cmocean.
- If you create animations or controls through our plotly.py or R libraries, you can now style sliders, buttons and menus through our UI.
Built on Open-Source, and Open-Sourced in Return
At Plotly, we stand on the shoulders of open-source giants, and we’re happy to give back: the source code for our new editor is available for anyone to integrate into their applications! Head on over to our GitHub repo to check it out.
This editor component is built on top of plotly.js’ new react-plotly.js interface, and also includes Plotly’s open-source react-colorscales component as well. Exporting your graphs to SVG, PNG or PDF all happens through Plotly’s open-source Orca image-exporting server.
As part of this work, we also sponsored some improvements to the JSON Editor project.
Our react-chart-editor project is not only used in Chart Studio. It’s also been incorporated into Plotly’s free and open-source Falcon SQL Connector, as well as integrated into a JupyterLab extension via the jupyterlab-chart-editor.
