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Comment by shaklee3 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone familiar with d3 describe why you'd use it instead of the many libraries that use it under the hood? For example, I think either bokeh or plotly uses it, but you don't have to learn any of the d3 details, and also have more capabilities like webgl.

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One of the frustrating things w this whole ecosystem is you basically have two choices:

* Use one of those higher-level libraries (bokeh, plotly) to create a chart that looks exactly like every other chart made by that library

* If you need to do anything custom, at all, you end up having to build from the ground up w d3.

In other words, those libraries are super cool and I use them on the reg, but they offer little to no customization, so people very often end up back at the bare-metal build-it-yourself-w-d3.

I can't speak for other libraries, but Plotly is extremely customizable: you can change pretty much color, font, dimension etc. There are thousands of attributes which can be tweaked, from the length of the tick markers to the exact positioning of the titles, the shapes of the markers, etc.

Here's the full Javascript reference for all of these attributes: https://plot.ly/javascript/reference/

it really depends on your use case! d3 is basically as close to the metal as you're going to get with visualizing data in a browser. It lets you build custom, interactive visualizations, and really is just a rocket booster. If you just want a simple chart and don't need much customization, there are tons of great higher level libraries that are easier to use.

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