ironlab-viewer

The interactive egui viewer for IronLAB figures, an interactive plotting tool for scientific computing in Rust.

The viewer is an eframe application that shows one or more figures as tabs, in which axes can be panned, zoomed and rotated, plots can be hidden or shown from the legend, and the properties of any object can be changed in a property editor. It is a deliberately simple consumer of the scene compiler: it tessellates the display list into egui meshes with lyon and turns every gesture into a typed edit of the figure model, recorded in a view overlay rather than applied to the figure it was given. Undo, redo, saving and PDF export all act on that overlay, so what is exported is exactly what is on screen. The crate also provides an offscreen renderer that draws a figure into an image without a window, which the documentation gallery and the tests use, and which the PDF exporter calls to rasterise dense content.

Where this crate sits

IronLAB is a Cargo workspace. ironlab-viewer sits at the top of the library stack and depends on ironlab-ir, ironlab-text, ironlab-scene and ironlab-pdf. Every PDF export in the project goes through this crate, because it is the crate that supplies the renderer the PDF backend asks for.

Most users should depend on the ironlab facade crate, whose show operation opens this viewer. Depend on ironlab-viewer directly only when you need this layer on its own, for instance to embed the canvas in an application of your own or to render figures offscreen.

The viewer binary

The crate ships a binary of the same name, which opens saved figure files:

cargo install ironlab-viewer
ironlab-viewer figure.fig

Several files may be given, and each opens in its own tab. The format of each file is chosen by its extension: .fig files are read as Protocol Buffers, the default format, and .json files (such as figure.fig.json) are read as JSON.

Documentation

The documentation site is at ironlab.org, where using the viewer describes its tools, gestures and keyboard shortcuts. The source is at github.com/thclark/ironlab.

IronLAB is moving quickly and breaking changes are expected. Pin to an exact version.

Licence

This crate is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version (AGPL-3.0-or-later).

If this conflicts with your use case, please raise an issue on the IronLAB repository and describe what you're trying to do. For commercial projects we can simply arrange a one-off license fee and for non-profit / academic efforts we may waive the fee.