Major New Features

• Improved Graphics Performance - ScottPlot 5 uses the SkiaSharp package to render graphics which is significantly faster than previous versions of ScottPlot which used System.Drawing.Common.

• Improved Cross-Platform Support - ScottPlot 4’s cross-platform support was undercut when Microsoft dropped cross-platform support for System.Drawing.Common in .NET 7, but ScottPlot 5 is supported on all platforms.

• Packages for Additional Platforms - In addition to supporting Windows Forms, WPF, Avalonia, and Eto, ScottPlot 5 now supports WinUI, Android, Uno Platform and Blazor!

• Expanded support for various data types - Previous versions of ScottPlot could only display data in double arrays, but many plot types in ScottPlot 5 support other data types like float, int, and DateTime, and can work with data in fixed-length arrays or variable-length lists.

• Customizable User Interactions - User controls now have classes that let developers modify what mouse and keyboard buttons map to which actions (panning, zooming, opening menus, etc.)

• Simplified Multi-Axis Support - Plotting data on multiple axes can be complicated, but ScottPlot 5 was designed from the ground up to make it easier for developers to create and manipulate plots with data plotted on multiple axes.

• Axis Rules - The Plot.Axes class contains a list of Rules which users can add to so custom logic is applied within the render system. Common rules include limiting how far users can zoom in or out of a plot, locking a horizontal or vertical axis, or ensuring that horizontal and vertical axes have the same scale so squares always appear as squares.

• Vector Rendering - ScottPlot 5’s new rendering system makes it easier to scale plots (e.g., increasing the size of all elements in accordance with the system’s display scaling settings) and also allows exporting plots as scalar vector graphic (SVG) files.

• Customizable Rendering System - Advanced users can achieve total control of rendering by manipulating the Plot.RenderManager.RenderActions list to remove default actions and/or add their own. This allows developers to extensively modify how plots are rendered without having to edit ScottPlot’s source code to create their own custom version of the package.

Major Changes from ScottPlot 4

Cookbook Search

The ScottPlot 5 cookbook has a search feature (https://scottplot.net/cookbook/5/search/) which makes it easy to locate code samples for common features. Efforts were made to ensure the correct ScottPlot 5 cookbook recipes when searching for names of ScottPlot 4 features.

Plots do not store a size

Instead of creating a plot with a given size, size is passed as arguments only when an image is to be rendered.

// ScottPlot 4
ScottPlot.Plot myPlot = new(600, 400);
myPlot.SaveFig("demo.png");

// ScottPlot 5
ScottPlot.Plot myPlot = new();
myPlot.SavePng("demo.png", 600, 400);

Adding Plottables

To reduce the surface area of the Plot API, helper methods which create plottables and add them to plots are all methods inside the Plot.Add class.

// ScottPlot 4
myPlot.AddScatter(xs, ys);

// ScottPlot 5
myPlot.Add.Scatter(xs, ys);

Support for Generic Types

In ScottPlot 4 most plot types could only work with double[], but in ScottPlot 5 many plot types can work with any numeric data type. This is even true for DateTime which is useful when plotting data with a date axis.

// ScottPlot 5
int[] xs = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 };
float[] ys = { 1, 4, 9, 16, 25 };
myPlot.Add.Scatter(xs, ys);

Signal Plots accept Period (not Sample Rate)

Signal plots display evenly-spaced data. ScottPlot 4 defined the spacing as a sample rate (points per unit) but ScottPlot 5 defines the spacing as a period (units between points).

// ScottPlot 4
double pointsPerSecond = 100;
myPlot.Add.Signal(ys, pointsPerSecond);

// ScottPlot 5
double secondsPerPoint = 0.01;
myPlot.Add.Signal(ys, secondsPerPoint);

Axis Limits

Logic that acts on axes is now inside the Axes class instead of living at the top level of the Plot class.

// ScottPlot 4
var limits = myPlot.GetAxisLimits();
myPlot.SetAxisLimits(0, 50, -1, 1);

// ScottPlot 5
var limits = myPlot.Axes.GetLimits();
myPlot.Axes.SetLimits(0, 50, -1, 1);

User Control Namespaces Changed

Windows Forms: ScottPlot.FormsPlot is now ScottPlot.WinForms.FormsPlot. Users upgrading from ScottPlot 4 will need to edit this reference in their designer files.

WPF: ScottPlot.WpfPlot is now ScottPlot.WPF.WpfPlot. Users upgrading from ScottPlot 4 will need to edit their xaml files to update the xmls window attribute.