rendering: Rendering Pipeline

In glyph: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics

Rendering Pipeline

Description

The rendering pipeline compiles a glyph_spec into output. The spec is first resolved (evaluate quosures, drop rows with missing mapped values, merge defaults), then serialized to JSON, then handed to a backend:

• "html" (default): htmlwidgets + D3.js for interactive viewing. This is currently the only implemented renderer; the visual output is SVG, drawn by D3 inside the widget.

• "svg", "canvas", "webgl", "pdf": standalone static/ large-data export backends. Planned, not yet implemented.

Details

A glyph spec is a plain data structure, and nothing is drawn until the compile() step resolves it into a concrete render tree. That means you can:

• Inspect the compiled spec as JSON (for debugging or export)

• Serialize it and render on a different machine

• Export it to Vega-Lite JSON (near 1:1 mapping)

• Add new backends later without changing the user-facing spec API

glyph documentation built on Oct. 21, 2026, 5:12 p.m.