References

livefigures stands on several decades of work in graph drawing, declarative visualization, and reproducible publishing. The design owes its central conviction — that figures should be programs or notations under version control, not opaque binary artifacts — to the literate programming tradition (Knuth 1984) and its modern reproducible research descendants (Peng 2011), of which Quarto itself is a direct heir.

The rendering stack draws on the systems below: Graphviz’s layout algorithms (Gansner and North 2000) and the hierarchical drawing methods they build on (Sugiyama et al. 1981); the Vega and Vega-Lite grammars (Satyanarayan et al. 2016, 2017) descended from Wilkinson’s Grammar of Graphics (Wilkinson 2005); force-directed placement (Fruchterman and Reingold 1991) for network layouts; and the PIC lineage of embedded diagram languages (Kernighan 1984) that pikchr continues today.

Bibliography

Fruchterman, Thomas M. J., and Edward M. Reingold. 1991. “Graph Drawing by Force-Directed Placement.” Software: Practice and Experience 21 (11): 1129–64.
Gansner, Emden R., and Stephen C. North. 2000. “An Open Graph Visualization System and Its Applications to Software Engineering.” Software: Practice and Experience 30 (11): 1203–33.
Kernighan, Brian W. 1984. PIC — a Graphics Language for Typesetting: Revised User Manual. Computing Science Technical Report 116. Bell Laboratories.
Knuth, Donald E. 1984. “Literate Programming.” The Computer Journal 27 (2): 97–111.
Peng, Roger D. 2011. “Reproducible Research in Computational Science.” Science 334 (6060): 1226–27. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1213847.
Satyanarayan, Arvind, Dominik Moritz, Kanit Wongsuphasawat, and Jeffrey Heer. 2017. “Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 23 (1): 341–50. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2016.2599030.
Satyanarayan, Arvind, Ryan Russell, Jane Hoffswell, and Jeffrey Heer. 2016. “Reactive Vega: A Streaming Dataflow Architecture for Declarative Interactive Visualization.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 22 (1): 659–68. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2015.2467091.
Sugiyama, Kozo, Shojiro Tagawa, and Mitsuhiko Toda. 1981. “Methods for Visual Understanding of Hierarchical System Structures.” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 11 (2): 109–25.
Wilkinson, Leland. 2005. The Grammar of Graphics. 2nd ed. Springer.