Version 5.3.0

The Vega Project is happy to announce the release of version 5.3.0 of the Vega-Altair Python visualization library. This release has been 4 months in the making and includes enhancements, fixes, and documentation improvements from 11 contributors.

What's Changed

• Update Vega-Lite from version 5.16.3 to version 5.17.0; see Vega-Lite Release Notes

Enhancements

• Add integration of VegaFusion and JupyterChart to enable scaling many interactive Vega-Altair charts to millions of rows. See VegaFusion Data Transformer for more information. Here is an example of histogram cross filtering with a 1 million row dataset.

  vegafusion_widget.mov

• Add "browser" renderer to support displaying Vega-Altair charts in an external web browser. See Browser Renderer for more information (#3379).

  browser_renderer.mov

• Support opening charts in the Vega editor with chart.open_editor() (#3358)

  open_editor.mov

• Add "jupyter" renderer which uses JupyterChart for rendering (#3283). See Displaying Altair Charts for more information.
• Add embed_options argument to JupyterChart to allow customization of Vega Embed options (#3304)
• Add offline support for JupyterChart and the new "jupyter" renderer. See JupyterChart - Offline Usage for more information.
• Add a new section to documentation on dashboards which have support for Altair (#3299)
• Support restrictive FIPS-compliant environment (#3291)
• Simplify type-hints to improve the readability of the function signature and docstring (#3307)
• Support installation of all optional dependencies via python -m pip install altair[all] and conda install altair-all -c conda-forge (#3354)
• Add privacy friendly web-analytics for the documentation (#3350)
• Additional gallery examples and documentation clarifications (#3233, #3266, #3276, #3282, #3298, #3299, #3323, #3334, #3324, #3340, #3350, #3353, #3357, #3362, #3363), including the following:

  • Histogram with Gradient Color
    

  • Multi-Line Tooltip (Standard)
    

  • Interactive column selection

    altair-ex-2024-03-12_10.16.49.mp4

Bug Fixes

• Fix error when embed_options are None (#3376)
• Fix type hints for libraries such as Polars where Altair uses the dataframe interchange protocol (#3297)
• Fix anywidget deprecation warning (#3364)
• Fix handling of Date32 columns in arrow tables and Polars DataFrames (#3377)

Backward-Incompatible Changes

• Changed hash function from md5 to a truncated sha256 non-cryptograhic hash (#3291)
• Updated chart.show() method to invoke the active renderer rather than depend on altair_saver (Which was never updated for use with Altair 5) (#3379).

New Contributors

• @franzhaas made their first contribution in #3278
• @ccravens made their first contribution in #3291
• @thomascamminady made their first contribution in #3323
• @d-trigo made their first contribution in #3350
• @RobinL made their first contribution in #3383

Release notes by pull requests

Click to view all 44 PRs merged in this release

• perf: Improve performance of Chart.from_dict by @RobinL in #3383
• feature: Add browser renderer to open charts in external browser and update chart.show() to display chart by @jonmmease in #3379
• fix: Don't error when embed_options are None by @jonmmease in #3376
• fix: Handle Date32 columns in Arrow tables and Polars DataFrames by @jonmmease in #3377
• fix: Support falling back to pandas when pyarrow is installed but too old by @jonmmease in #3387
• docs: Remove release notes and fully capture them in GitHub Releases by @binste in #3380
• Update save.py to use utf-8 instead of None per default by @franzhaas in #3278
• Consolidate governance documents in Vega Organization by @domoritz in #3277
• doc: histogram with gradient color by @mattijn in #3282
• Update for FIPS Compliance by @ccravens in #3291
• Docs: Fix link to project governance docs by @binste in #3298
• Fix type checker errors for libraries such as Polars where Altair uses dataframe interchange protocol by @binste in #3297
• Integrate VegaFusion into JupyterChart by @jonmmease in #3281
• Add "jupyter" renderer based on JupyterChart by @jonmmease in #3283
• Docs: Add section on displaying Altair charts in dashboards by @binste in #3299
• Validate version of vegafusion-python-embed by @jonmmease in #3303
• Add embed_options to JupyterChart and pass them through in "jupyter" renderer by @jonmmease in #3304
• Add offline support to JupyterChart and "jupyter" renderer by @jonmmease in #3305
• Type hints: Simplify to improve user experiences by @binste in #3307
• Adding missing interpolation methods to Line example by @thomascamminady in #3323
• Docs: Link to new section on Altair in Plotly docs by @binste in #3324
• Docs: Mark completed items in roadmap by @binste in #3326
• Docs: Mention Marimo in Dashboards section by @binste in #3334
• Relax type hint for 'indent' in to_json method by @binste in #3342
• MAINT: Reformat codebase with new style of ruff 0.3.0 by @binste in #3345
• Docs: Add another version of the 'Multiline Tooltip' exmaple which uses the standard tooltip by @binste in #3340
• Docs: Add privacy-friendly web analytics with plausible by @binste in #3346
• Docs: Modifying scale of "multiple interactions" example and adding legend adjustments by @d-trigo in #3350
• Add example of how to update titles based on a selection parameters by @joelostblom in #3353
• Add all dependency group by @jonmmease in #3354
• Add timeseries filtering example to illustrate subsetting of columns from selector values by @joelostblom in #3357
• Fix anywidget deprecation warning by @jonmmease in #3364
• Clarifications to the interactive docs by @joelostblom in #3362
• Open charts in the default browser with open_editor method by @joelostblom in #3358
• Change "mouse" to "pointer" everywhere by @joelostblom in #3363
• doc: update numpy-tooltip-images.rst by @mattijn in #3233
• Change a couple of more additional occurences of pointer over by @joelostblom in #3368
• [Doc] Fix Chart and MarkDef language by @ChiaLingWeng in #3266
• Add remaining changelog entries for 5.3 by @joelostblom in #3369
• Upgrade to Vega-Lite 5.17.0 by @binste in #3367
• Add a few 5.3 changelog entries by @jonmmease in #3372
• Add note about conda "all" installation and how to install without optional dependencies by @joelostblom in #3373
• Update README badges to reflect updated tool chain by @mattijn in #3374
• chore: Add templates for PRs and automated release notes by @joelostblom in #3381

Full Changelog: v5.2.0...v5.3.0