Getting Started

Let's have a quick walk through on how to produce a data plot with Plotters. This is an example that plotting the graph of a simple equation y = sin(x) to a PNG file.

Step 0 - Install prerequisite libraries to system

Plotters may use some library installed on your system, depends on what operating system you are using.

  • For Linux user: please make sure libfontconfig package is installed. For Ubuntu/Debian user, use the following command to install them.

    sudo apt-get install libfontconfig libfontconfig1-dev

  • For Windows and OSX user: No prerequisite library is required.

Step 1 - Add dependency to cargo.toml

In order to use Plotters, add the following line to your cargo.tmol

[dependencies]
plotters = "0.3"

Alternatively if you have cargo-edit, use the following command to add the dependency

cargo add plotters

Step 2 - Add plotting code

As an example, we provide a minimal code that draws the function graph. We can just simply put the following code to the src/main.rs

use plotters::prelude::*;

fn main() {
    let root_drawing_area = BitMapBackend::new("images/0.1.png", (1024, 768))
        .into_drawing_area();

    root_drawing_area.fill(&WHITE).unwrap();

    let mut chart = ChartBuilder::on(&root_drawing_area)
        .build_cartesian_2d(-3.14..3.14, -1.2..1.2)
        .unwrap();

    chart.draw_series(LineSeries::new(
        (-314..314).map(|x| x as f64 / 100.0).map(|x| (x, x.sin())),
        &RED
    )).unwrap();
}

Step 3 - Build and run

Use the following command to build and run the example

cargo run

And the output will be saved under the current working directory with the file name /images/0.1.png.

0.1.png