Output

A Plot is only displayed when returned (a semicolon will suppress the return), or if explicitly displayed with display(plt), gui(), or by adding show = true to your plot command.

Standalone window

Calling gui(plt) will open a standalone window. gui(), like plot!(...), applies to the "current" Plot. Returning a Plot object to the REPL is like calling gui(plt).

Jupyter / IJulia

Plots are shown inline when returned to a cell. The default output format is svg for backends that support it. This can be changed by the html_output_format attribute, with alias fmt:

plot(rand(10); fmt = :png)

savefig / format

Plots support 2 different versions per save-command. Command savefig chooses file type automatically based on the file extension.

savefig(filename_string)  # save the most recent fig as filename_string (such as "output.png")
savefig(plot_ref, filename_string)  # save the fig referenced by plot_ref as filename_string (such as "output.png")

In addition, Plots exports the convenience function png(filename::AbstractString). Other functions such as PlotsBase.pdf or PlotsBase.svg remain unexported, since they might conflict with exports from other packages. In this case the string fn containing the filename does not need a file extension.

png(filename_string)  # save the current fig as png with filename filename_string (such as "output.png")
png(plot_ref, filename_string)  # save the fig referenced by plot_ref as png with filename filename_string (such as "output.png")

File formats supported by most graphical backends

• png (default output format for savefig, if no file extension is given)
• svg
• pdf

When not using savefig, the default output format depends on the environment (e.g., when using IJulia/Jupyter).

Supported output file formats

Note: not all backends support every output file format ! A simple table showing which format is supported by which backend

Supported file formats can be written to an IO stream via, for example, png(myplot, pipebuffer::IO), so the image file can be passed via a PipeBuffer to other functions, eg. Cairo.read_from_png(pipebuffer::IO).