Chaco 5.1.0

Chaco is a Python package for building interactive and custom 2-D plots and visualizations. Chaco facilitates writing plotting applications at all levels of complexity, from simple scripts with hard-coded data to large plotting programs with complex data interrelationships and a multitude of interactive tools. While Chaco generates attractive static plots for publication and presentation, Chaco differs from tools like Matplotlib in that it also works well for dynamic interactive data visualization and exploration. Chaco is part of the Enthought Tool Suite.

Chaco includes renderers for many popular plot types, built-in implementations of common interactions with those plots, and a framework for extending and customizing plots and interactions. Chaco can also render graphics in a non-interactive fashion to images, in either raster or vector formats, and it has a subpackage for doing command-line plotting or simple scripting.

Installation

Chaco and all of its dependencies (including the PyQt backend) can be installed using the Enthought Deployment Manager (formerly EPD):

edm install chaco pyqt5

For full installation options, including installation from source, see the installation instructions.

Documentation

For developers exploring Chaco for the first time, these tutorials and examples give a good overview of the capabilities of Chaco:

• Sample Plot Gallery

• Tutorial: Interactive plotting with Chaco

• Examples:

  • Modeling Van del Waal’s Equations

  • Creating an interactive Hyetograph

There is also a How Do I…? page which provides answers to issues and common tricks that help when building Chaco applications.

For comprehensive documentation, we have:

• User Guide

• Developer Reference

• API Reference

• Search Page

Reporting bugs and contributing

Since Chaco is open source and hosted on Github, the development version can always be checked out from Github, forked, and modified at will. When a bug is found, please submit an issue in the issue page. If you would like to share a bug fix or a new feature, simply submit a Pull Request from your fork. Don’t forget to specify very clearly what code to run to reproduce the issue, what the logic of the fix is and to add one or more unit tests to ensure future stability. The Pull Request description can and often needs to contain screenshots of the issue or the fix.

License

As part of the Enthought Tool Suite, Chaco is free and open source under a BSD license:

This software is OSI Certified Open Source Software. OSI Certified is a certification mark of the Open Source Initiative.

Copyright (c) 2005-2021, Enthought, Inc. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

• Neither the name of Enthought, Inc. nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

DISCLOSURE: Under the terms of the Matplotlib 0.83.2 License Agreement, Enthought must disclose where the Matplotlib source code has been used:

• Chaco makes use of some code from Matplotlib for creating linear segmented colormaps. This code from Matplotlib has been incorporated directly into the Chaco LinearSegmentedColormap class and is marked with the tag #### matplotlib ####.

• The “contour” module is also from the Matplotlib project.

The above code is licensed under the terms of the Matplotlib license, reproduced below:

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