I want to contribute (open for suggestions)

[kimkroener]

Hi everyone,

I'm a Masters's student at the University of Stuttgart and participating in the course Simulation Software Engineering. As part of this course we are asked to contribute to an open source project to get familiar with the development workflow of such projects. For this challenge I chose Makie and I'm looking for suggestions :)

The contribution should be small but meaningful and there are no limitations for this contribution. It could be a new tutorial, bug fix, documentation, or any other maintenance task. However it should be something that is a good first issue as I'm a beginner Julia (and Makie) user (I do have programming experience in Matlab and Python) and I'm looking forward to learn by contributing.

[ffreyer]

One suggestion I have is working on patterns/hatching. A probably very simple thing you could fix is that the show method for Makie.ImagePattern errors.
Currently patterns are only supported by mesh plots in GLMakie and are therefore still an unofficial feature. I think the most important step towards officially supporting patterns is a CairoMakie implementation. This means figuring out how Cairo handles hatching, adjusting LinePattern to be compatible with it and adding it to the CairoMakie mesh method. (And if LinePattern is a terrible representation it should be fine to replace it too. There just needs to be a to_image method so that GLMakie know what image texture to draw.)

The original prs implementing patterns are JuliaPlots/AbstractPlotting.jl#457 and JuliaPlots/GLMakie.jl#108. There is also an issue requesting this: #1385

[kimkroener]

Thank you for your suggestions and sorry for my late reply. Pattern support sounds super interesting.
I started looking into it and I realized I don't feel comfortable enough with my Julia (and Makie) skills yet to work on a feature implementation.

Instead I also took a look at documentation issues - there is for example #1112 for boxplot attributes. I think this docstring has been updated in part but it doesn't show in the API reference at all and does not show the current docstring when calling help from the REPL

help?> boxplot

Also for the violin, the doc string does not match the attributes implemented. Related to that is issue #1312.

I'd like to fix these issues, is there anything I need to be aware of e.g. a style guide?

[MariusDrulea]

Maybe a bit late, but I noticed Makie is terrible in dealing with images or large arrays. Makie is awesome, but it was tested only for small data so far. See here: #1427, #1650. This un-optimal way of showing the images is a serious bottleneck and there is room for contributing in this direction as well.

[SimonDanisch]

It should be fine with showing images, just heatmaps are a lot more taxing on performance intensive right now...

[MariusDrulea]

@SimonDanisch I initially used image instead of heatmap because heatmap supports transparency while image does not. At that point in time I was not aware that image is a lot lighter than heatmap.

Therefore, indeed, there is no serious bottleneck anymore.

[harisorgn]

One suggestion I have is working on patterns/hatching. A probably very simple thing you could fix is that the show method for Makie.ImagePattern errors.

Hi there,
wanted to start contributing to Makie and Julia and thought that this would be an entry-level fix. I just created PR #1794 with a basic fix to the show function (it just does not error).

[SimonDanisch]

Thank you! Closing this since its not really an "issue" :)