Exploring Gadfly’s customizable components

This section will briefly mention the most notorious differences between Plots and Gadfly plot component nomenclature. In Chapter 5, Introducing the Grammar of Graphics, we described some components of a Gadfly figure. Here, we will highlight Guides, Coordinates, and Scales. Scales determines the scales used by the axes, color, sizes, shapes, and line styles. Coordinates chooses the coordinate system for our axes; however, in Gadfly 1.3, only cartesian coordinates are available.

Finally, Guides offers support for adding and customizing axes, annotations, titles, and keys. The keys generate the legends of the plot; we can have color, shape, and size keys. If the color scale is continuous, the color key will create a color bar rather than something similar to a Plots legend. Gadfly’s Guides will allow you to modify the axes ticks and labels and add rugs. These rugs are short lines that indicate the position in the axes where...