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)

Juno / Atom

Plots are shown in the Atom PlotPane when possible, either when returned to the console or to an inline code block. At any time, the plot can be opened in a standalone window using the gui() command. The PlotPane can be disabled in Juno's settings.

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 Plots.pdf or Plots.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).