Style Unleashed

Ian Cross

Oct 4, 2022 2 min read

An artist depicts the incredibly powerful flare that erupted from the red dwarf star EV Lacertae.

Source image ‘Pipsqueak Star Unleashes Monster Flare’ (link) by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (link) is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (link).

Figular had a new release last week and the most visible aspects are the new style and format options on the website:

The new features available on the concept/circle figure: a new styling section and the ability to download in PNG or SVG format

New Style

It’s always been the aim for Figular to have a flexible styling system similar to what is used on the web (CSS). Our new controls allow anyone to take a Figure and restyle it for their needs.

The two Figures Circle and Org Chart now have many ways to be customised. These Figures are composed from drawing primitives such as circles, text boxes and lines. Each of these primitives has properties that can be changed like colour and font. Those properties are available for you to change within the new “Styling” area (highlighted in the above screenshot, left side).

Don’t like the default style on the Circle Figure? How about a deep magenta background, dark grey 3pt borders and 16pt bold Palatino text in pale red:

The Democracy Circle Figure Example with alternative style

A complete description of all the options can be found on the help pages for each figure: circle and orgchart.

New Format

Until now it’s only been possible to download a Figure in the vector Scalable Vector Graphics or SVG format. Not all computers have good support for this so we have added the ability to download a raster PNG image which is far more common (and is also the new default). Use the toggles under the “Download” button to switch format:

API and Cmdline

For those using the API or the cmdline even more is possible so check out the section on styling in our docs for all the detail. In particular you can apply style to many primitives at once using CSS-like selectors such as nth-child. One caveat is that we have not yet exposed the ability to choose a different format at the cmdline but that is certainly something we’ll add before too long.

Up Next

Effort now turns to expanding the number of figures available to really show what’s possible and useful about Figular. You can follow our progress on the wiki at the Roadmap.