Figure

Figure is the flowss studio for journal-ready research figures. You bring a dataset in, draw panels from it, compose them at your journal's real column width in millimetres, and export files that already meet that journal's published artwork rules. Every value in a generated panel comes from your rows; nothing is retyped by a model. A compliance check reads the composed artwork the whole time you work (width, height, type size, image resolution, vector format, colour mode and colour-vision safety), and an export gate stops a figure that breaks a blocking rule from leaving until you repair it or record that you read the finding. One project holds a whole manuscript of figures, each with its own data, cleaning ledger and analyses, and a single click writes them all, with a preflight report, into one ZIP. You open Figure at /figure.

This page covers the workspace, bringing data in, drawing and composing panels, the journal check and every export. The cleaning, transform, statistics and study-design benches have their own page: Figure analysis and statistics.

At a glance

On Windows and Linux, read ⌘ as Ctrl, ⌥ as Alt and ⇧ as Shift throughout this page.

Opening Figure

1. Sign in. Figure needs a signed-in account; a signed-out visit goes to sign-in and returns you to the same address afterwards.
2. Go to /figure, or choose Figure from the workstation navigation.
3. If your plan is Free, you are redirected to /pricing. Starter, Plus, Ultra and Enterprise all open Figure.

A short loading skeleton shows while the studio starts. A first visit lands on the canvas with nothing open and the Bring data in card in the middle. After that, Figure remembers which centre view you had up (Data table or Figure) and which face of the analyst you last used (Advisor or AI chat). It always reopens with the benches and the analyst put away, so a reload lands on a clear canvas. On a screen narrower than 1,024 pixels everything opens closed regardless.

The workspace

The canvas is the page. Everything else floats on it in fixed places and puts itself away when you are done with it.

The Help button opens Keyboard shortcuts and Help centre.

The empty canvas

The card steps aside while a rail flyout is open, because the flyout is the same door.

The tool rail and its benches

The five tool buttons each open a bench as a flyout beside the rail. Pressing the same button again closes it. A flyout with several tabs remembers the tab you were last on for the rest of the session.

Three benches are not on the rail because they are not tools: Compose is the Inspector's Page tab, Check is the status badge's popover, and Export is the Export button. All eleven benches can be reached by name from ⌘K (for example, type "Clean" or "Check").

The analysis benches (Clean, Transform, Tests and Design) are documented in Figure analysis and statistics.

The ⋮ file menu

The verbs in this menu are also ⌘K commands, so the menu and the palette always agree. The exceptions are Data (CSV), the studio rows under Send to ▸, and the three lists (Load a sample ▸, Start from a figure ▸ and Journal ▸), which live in the menu only.

⌘K also offers Run compliance check (opens the Check report), Generate figure legend, Undo and Redo, and "go to" rows for every screen: the two views, the eleven benches and the analyst's two faces.

On a phone, the status report, the view toggle (Show the figure or Show the data table) and the zoom menu move into the ⋮.

The status badge

The badge beside the title is the figure's one verdict.

Clicking the badge opens the Check report, titled Check · followed by the journal's name (see Checking against the journal). The platform's stage chip also sits inside it; choosing a stage there hands the work to the flowss Figure Agent's AI chat. See The work model.

A manuscript of figures

A Figure project is a manuscript: up to 12 figures that you switch between from the title. Each figure keeps its own dataset, its own data ledger and its own analyses, so the Methods paragraph for Figure 2 describes Figure 2's rows and nothing else.

Each row in the switcher carries a small database marker. Hover it to read the panel count and one of: "the dataset on screen", "carries its own dataset, different from the one on screen" (the marker turns amber, so you know choosing it will swap the table), or "no data of its own".

Note: A manuscript always keeps at least one figure. ⋮ → Delete figure… on the last one says "A manuscript keeps at least one figure — add another before deleting this one."

Warning: Work that finishes after you switch figure is never applied to the wrong one. If a chart, a fit, a restyle, a re-render, a refresh, a legend or an AI run lands after you moved, it is dropped and a toast names the figure it was for, for example: That chart was for "Figure 1", not the figure now on screen — it was not applied. Switch back to it and try again.

Your first figure, step by step

1. Open /figure. The canvas shows Bring data in.
2. Paste CSV, TSV or JSON into the box and press Analyse data, or press Upload a file, or press the Load a sample link. To see a finished figure first, pick one from Or start from a figure (volcano, Kaplan–Meier, forest plot and others).
3. The card now reads your rows back (for example "20 rows · 5 columns: patient, arm, …") and offers Draw a chart and Run a test. Press Draw a chart.
4. On the Charts bench, press one of the Recommended charts, or choose a Chart type under Build by hand, pick the columns for each role and press Generate panel. The panel appears on the canvas at its printed size.
5. Add more panels the same way. Open Layers to caption them and set how many grid columns each spans.
6. Press the title's ⋮ → Journal ▸ and choose your journal. The figure snaps to that journal's column width and line-art dpi, and the panel letters follow its convention where one is known.
7. Open Page setup… to set the column fit, the title and the caption. Generate legend writes a caption from the title and panel captions.
8. Watch the status badge. If it shows a count, click it to open the Check report and press the repair buttons, or fix the finding by hand.
9. Press Export. Choose the format, or the All N figures + preflight (ZIP) button for the whole manuscript.

Bringing data in

Paste or upload

The Data in tab (rail Data) is the full intake; the canvas card is a quick version of it.

What the parser accepts:

Notes appear in amber above the rows line. They are not errors: the data loaded, and the note tells you how it was read.

Warning: Pressing Analyse data or uploading a new file replaces the rows and starts a fresh provenance chain: the data ledger, the analyses on the bench and any declared experimental unit are cleared, and undo history for the table starts again. If you had edited the table, a note says "Reloaded from the pasted text — earlier table edits, the ledger and past analyses were reset."

Sample datasets and figure starters

Samples are for learning the studio. The five datasets are:

Loading a sample also sets the analyst's research discipline to the sample's field, if the discipline is still General research.

The 13 figure starters are the classic research figures, each a small invented dataset that opens as its finished figure through the same chart builder you use by hand, drawn across the full width of the grid. Replace the rows with your own (with Refresh data on the panel) and the same figure is drawn from them.

The example-data marker

While a figure's rows are a sample (Figure recognises a sample when at least half your rows match one), the studio says so everywhere it matters until you replace them with your own:

Cleaning a sample does not clear the mark; replacing the rows does. A new figure made from a sample's rows keeps the mark too.

Large datasets

Figure saves each figure's rows in this browser. Rows whose saved form would exceed 750,000 characters are kept for the session but not saved: the note "This dataset is too large to persist locally — it stays for this session and still exports." appears, the rows survive switching between figures, and every export still includes them. Reloading the page loses them, so keep the source file. A new figure cannot inherit rows this large: you are told "This dataset is too large to persist locally, so it did not travel to the new figure — paste or upload it here." A duplicate does carry them.

Rows from other studios

Several places hand rows to Figure, which opens them as a new figure titled after the data (or "Imported data") beside whatever you have open, with the toast "Your data opened as a new figure sheet":

The hand-off holds up to about 600 KB of text. If it cannot be staged the sending studio says "Couldn't stage the data (too large or storage unavailable)." If your project already holds 12 figures, the imported rows wait: the message says to remove a figure and reload the page, and they open then. See Moving work between studios.

SVG panels

Any SVG you already have can be a panel. Use the From an SVG you already have box on the Data in tab (or ⋮ → Paste SVG…), paste the markup and press Add as panel (disabled until the box has text), or press Upload .svg (or ⋮ → Import SVG file…).

Every SVG is cleaned on the way in: scripts and anything that can run or fetch are removed, and only references inside the document (#…) and embedded data:image/… pictures survive. If the SVG pointed at an external image or a linked file, the panel still arrives, with a note naming what was removed and that the panel "will export blank where it drew". Re-export the SVG with its images embedded as base64 data URIs and add it again.

A pasted SVG panel has no engine source, so it cannot be restyled, re-rendered from source or refreshed from new data, and it wears a grey untraced chip on the canvas.

Images: micrographs, blots and photographs

Under A micrograph, blot or photograph, press Upload image (or ⋮ → Import image…). The picture is embedded in the figure at its own pixel size, so the figure stays one self-contained file and the Check report can hold it to the journal's halftone dpi across the millimetres it occupies.

The image panel's caption starts as the file name without its extension, and its source line records the file name, pixel size and type. An image panel cannot be restyled or refreshed.

The Data table view

Switch the centre of the screen between Data table and Figure with the toggle in the view island (or ⌘K → "Data table"). The table is a card over the canvas holding every row, editable. With no data, the canvas shows the Bring data in card instead.

The table's own counter reads "N rows · M columns". An empty table says "No rows — add one, or paste new data." If an operation is refused (renaming onto an existing name, deleting the last column, a coercion whose reading is ambiguous), the reason appears in a red strip above the table. Every edit is undoable and recorded in the data ledger. While the table is showing, ⌘Z and the view island's Undo undo data changes; while the figure is showing, they undo composition changes.

Drawing panels: the Charts bench

Open the rail's Chart button.

Recommended charts

Under Recommended, up to six charts are proposed for your columns, each with its engine and a one-line reason. Press one to draw it.

Build by hand

Under Build by hand, choose a Chart type (the picker names each with its engine in brackets), pick a column for each role (roles marked "(optional)" can stay empty), set any options the type has, and press Generate panel. Below the picker, a line describes the chosen type. Options left blank use the default shown in the table.

The shared options:

For the engines behind these charts, see Choosing an engine and Charts and data-visualisation engines.

How generated panels behave

The commonest refusal is a bar chart with error bars over rows that repeat a group: "Error bars need one row per group - the spread is already a summary, and the average of two standard deviations is not a standard deviation. … Summarise on the Analyse bench first." The button beside it, Summarise followed by your value and group columns and as mean ± SEM (for example "Summarise weight by arm as mean ± SEM"), summarises the table in one undoable step; then press Generate panel again. If you declared an experimental unit, the button honours it (it averages within each unit first). To summarise by hand, use Data → Transform → summarise.

The first chart of a session can take a few seconds while the chart renderer loads.

The canvas

The Figure view shows the composed figure exactly as it exports. 100% on this canvas is the true printed size.

Panels that the provenance ledger has something to say about wear a chip at their bottom-right corner:

A current panel wears nothing; the absence is the signal. See Figure analysis and statistics.

View controls

The zoom percentage menu in the view island holds:

+ (or =) and - zoom in and out. While the column guides are on, or the panels are aligned on their data regions, hovering a plot shows the data value under the pointer, read back through the panel's own axes.

The panel context toolbar

Controls that do not apply to a panel are absent rather than disabled.

Working with panels

The Layers bench

The rail's Layers button lists every panel in reading order. With no panels it says "No panels yet."

The Style inspector

For a Vega-Lite chart panel, Style opens the Inspector's Style tab, Panel appearance. It changes appearance only: it refuses any change that would move the panel's data, and your choices are carried across a data refresh. Text fields commit when you leave them or press Enter.

With no chart panel selected, the tab reads "Select a chart panel to style its titles, axes, palette and type."

The Source editor

Edit source (or Source on a card, or a double-click) opens the Inspector's Source tab with "The" engine's name "source that drew this panel. Edit and re-render — the result is scrubbed before it replaces the artwork." Edit the text and press Re-render, or Cancel. A hand-edited source keeps its data link. An error from the renderer appears under the box and nothing changes. With no panel that has a source selected, the tab reads "Select a panel drawn from source to edit what drew it."

Refresh from new data

A panel drawn from your data can be redrawn from a newer export of the same data, with its styling kept.

1. Press Refresh data on the panel's card, Refresh from new data in the toolbar, or the Refresh from new data button on the Source tab.
2. Paste the data as it is now, or press Upload file.
3. Press Check drift. The drift report says whether the panel can be refreshed ("Compatible — every column this figure reads survives." or "Not refreshable as the data stands.") and what changed: rows added or removed, new or missing columns, and columns whose type changed.
4. If it is compatible, press Refresh panel (the button names the panel's letter). Cancel abandons the refresh.

Editing the pasted text after a check clears the drift report, so the panel is never refreshed from rows you did not check.

What a refresh does:

A refresh is refused, with "Refused:" followed by the reason and "The panel is untouched.", when a column the chart reads is missing or changed type, or when the figure was drawn after table edits that cannot be re-applied to new rows (a filter, a cell edit). In that case make the same edits to the new data on the bench and chart it again.

Tip: The Export bench warns when a panel was drawn from rows that have changed since (for example "Panel B was drawn from rows that have changed since. …"). Refresh those panels before you export the repro bundle, so that re-running their sources against the bundled data reproduces them.

Page setup (the Compose bench)

Open the Inspector's Page tab with Page setup…, the Page size row of the zoom menu, or ⌘K → "Compose". From top to bottom:

Generate legend, Copy alt text and One shared colour key are disabled until the figure has a panel.

Changing the journal sets the figure's width to the chosen fit's width at the new journal (for PLOS, the widest permitted) and the target dpi to the journal's line-art floor, and re-letters the panels if their style was the previous journal's convention. A letter style you chose yourself stays, and the Check report notes the disagreement. A vector format you picked for the old journal is reset.

Journal presets

Every number is the publisher's own, taken from its artwork guidelines, except where the preset's source note says otherwise; the Check report quotes the source beside every finding. Some values could not be confirmed from the publisher and the source note says so: the whole Springer entry is marked unverified, and the maximum heights of Cell Press and Elsevier are approximations. The Generic preset is not sourced from any publisher.

Every preset except Generic prefers TIFF for rasters; Generic prefers PNG. A new figure starts on Generic (no journal selected), single column, two grid columns, a 4 mm gutter and 600 dpi. Generic is a fallback, not a journal: choose your target before treating a figure as submission-ready.

Note: Several publishers allow a width this three-size model cannot express (Nature's column-and-a-half, Cell Press's 114 mm, Elsevier's 140 mm, Springer's 39 and 129 mm). Individual journals from a publisher can also override the house rules. Check your target journal's own guide for anything unusual.

Annotating

The rail's Annotate button opens the annotation layer: marks that live on the figure, in millimetres, over every panel, so a redraw from new data never takes them with it.

The bench opens with the recommended path for significance: Significance brackets are computed. Run Tukey's HSD, Dunnett's test or Games–Howell on the Analyse bench and press Bracket on a row of its table; the bracket prints that test's adjusted p and cites its ledger entry. Bracket from a test opens the Analyse bench. See Figure analysis and statistics.

To add a mark, press one of the Text, Arrow, Bracket, Typed significance or Scale bar buttons (each marked with a plus). The mark appears a quarter of the way in and about a third of the way down, and is selected. With nothing added, the list reads "Nothing on the layer yet." Press a mark's name in the list to select it and show its fields.

With a mark selected, the arrow keys nudge it 0.1 mm, or 1 mm with ⇧ (not while you are typing in a field). A run of nudges is one undo step. Marks are placed with the nudge controls; they cannot be dragged on the canvas. Selecting a mark deselects any panel and the other way round, so the arrow keys never move both. The bin icon ("Remove this annotation") removes a mark.

Warning: A typed significance mark is typed, not computed: nothing checks it against a test, and the Check report lists every one as such. Use it only over artwork that no test on this figure produced.

Checking against the journal

Figure checks the composed figure continuously against the chosen journal's rules. Open the report from the status badge, from the ⋮ (on a phone), with ⌘K → Run compliance check, or with ⌘K → "Check". The report holds, in order:

When nothing is found the report says No issues found. and explains its limits: type size is read off the text a panel contains, resolution off the images it embeds, and colour-vision safety off the colours it uses more than one of. "Absent is untested, not cleared."

Readiness levels

The rules

Repairs are undoable with ⌘Z. Repair buttons appear on warnings as well as errors. Repair palette recolours every panel with the same old → new table, so one category stays one colour across panels; for a chart drawn from your data it changes the chart's source, so a later refresh does not bring the old colours back. If a restyled chart will not render, its drawn colours are swapped instead and a note says which panel.

Exporting

Press Export (or ⋮ → Export ▸, or ⌘K). The popover is titled Export followed by the figure's name.

The export gate

If a blocking rule fires, the bench opens with Export blocked and the number of rules (for example "Export blocked — 2 rules"), and the line "The journal will not take this figure as it stands. Each rule below is the journal's, not ours." (with your journal's name). Each finding is listed with its fix and repair button. The artwork exports (SVG, PNG, TIFF, PDF, the manuscript ZIP and the repro bundle) stay unavailable, from the buttons and from the ⋮ and ⌘K alike, until you either repair the findings or press the waiver button: "Export anyway — I have read this violation" (or "… these 3 violations", counting the findings).

Exporting anyway records a waiver in the figure. Waivers are listed in amber (for example "2 waived findings — named in preflight.txt and the bundle README") with Withdraw on each. A waiver covers exactly the finding you read: if the figure changes so that the finding is different, or a new finding of the same rule appears, the gate closes again and asks for a fresh acknowledgement. Only errors block; warnings never do. Data (CSV) is never gated. A refused export from the menu or ⌘K shows the gate's reason as a toast.

What you can export

The copy buttons read Copied for a moment. LaTeX, Subfigures and Markdown need at least one panel; Caption does not. The snippets point at exactly the file names the buttons save, so a pasted snippet finds its file.

Under the buttons, a paragraph says what the bundle carries for this figure, including how many panels have an engine source, and that everything in it is this figure's own: its rows, its ledger and its analyses. If any panel was drawn from rows that have changed since, an amber note names it and suggests Refresh data first. At the foot of the popover, Data ledger — followed by the figure's name lists the last eight operations recorded on the rows.

The manuscript ZIP and preflight.txt

The manuscript ZIP is gated on every figure, not just the one on screen. If another figure breaks its journal's rules, the button is unavailable and the reason under it names the figures, for example: "Export blocked — 1 of 3 figures breaks the journal's rules. Figure 3: min-font-size." Switch to that figure to repair it.

preflight.txt is a plain-text report a production desk and co-authors can read: for each figure, the settings it was exported at, its findings, any waivers quoted verbatim under "WAIVED BY THE AUTHOR", panels drawn from rows that changed since, and the journal page the rules came from. Its vector line always names the file Figure actually writes ("Vector format: svg — the .svg in this export"); when the journal takes something else, a "Journal takes:" line names the journal's formats and says to convert the .svg (in Illustrator or Inkscape). manifest.json records the same: vectorFormat is "svg", with journalVectorFormats and convertVectorTo. An empty findings list is reported as "No rule fired. That is not the same as correct": the checker measures size, type, resolution, format and colour separation, not the science.

The reproducibility bundle

The README lists every file and says how to redraw the figure: run each file in source/ against data.csv, and re-compose at what manifest.json records. It says plainly how many panels carry a source (a pasted SVG and a statistical panel have none, and travel as artwork only), names waivers, and names panels drawn from rows that have changed. In data.csv and the Data CSV export, a text cell that begins with =, +, -, @, a tab or a carriage return gets a leading apostrophe so a spreadsheet opens it as text rather than running it as a formula; numbers are never changed.

File names

Sending the figure on

Figure itself cannot receive diagrams from the Send to menus of other studios; it receives datasets (see Rows from other studios).

The Figure analyst

The prompt at the bottom of the canvas, Ask the flowss Figure Agent…, opens a sheet titled flowss Figure Agent — Figure analyst with two tabs. Enter sends, ⇧Enter adds a line, Escape closes the sheet. Typing in the prompt sends your request to the AI chat tab.

The disciplines are General research, Medicine & clinical research, Public health & epidemiology, Biology & life sciences, Psychology & behavioural science, Engineering & materials, Physics, Chemistry, Environmental science, Business & marketing analytics, Economics, Social science & survey research, and Data science & machine learning.

The Advisor

The Advisor shows up to ten cards, each labelled with its area (Data, Clean, Analyse, Chart, Compose or Check), a title and a detail line. A card with an action has Do it (it reads Working… while running). It proposes, in order: up to three cleaning fixes, up to four analyses your columns support (a comparison of groups is always the assumption gate's pick, with the reason, and a sheet whose only numbers are counters says "No measured column to test yet"), two recommended charts ("Draw:" and the chart), composition gaps (no panels yet, or Generate the figure legend when there is no caption), and up to three blocking findings with their repairs (for a dpi finding, "Raise export resolution to" the line-art dpi) or a "no one-click fix" note. When it has nothing to propose it says so, and says that silence is not a pass. See Figure analysis and statistics.

The AI chat

The flowss Figure Agent works on the selected panel's source. With no panel selected, it starts from a chart scaffold carrying up to 150 of your rows (fewer if they are large, as few as ten), and it is told exactly how many rows it has, so it does not state totals for rows it never saw. Whatever comes back is re-rendered and cleaned before it becomes a panel: it replaces the selected panel, or becomes a new panel when none is selected, and the canvas switches to the Figure view. Revert this run ("Undo everything this run changed") takes a run back; for a run that created a panel, that panel is removed. The chat offers examples such as "Chart the strongest relationship in this dataset", "Grouped bar chart with the y-axis starting at zero, units in the label" and "Restyle the selected panel for print: bigger type, colour-blind-safe palette". A chart the AI rewrote drops its data link, so Refresh data no longer applies to it.

AI needs your own key (Starter) or hosted AI points (Plus and up). See AI points and limits and Bring your own AI key.

Saving, syncing and history

Warning: If storage fills up, the badge turns to Not saved ("Storage is full — export to keep this work"). Export the repro bundle or the manuscript ZIP straight away, then free space by deleting figures you no longer need or very large images.

Keyboard shortcuts

Canvas keys are ignored while you type in a field. See Keyboard shortcuts.

Tips

• Pick the journal first. The width, the target dpi, the panel letters and the type size a new chart is drawn at all follow it.
• Use the line art dpi for anything with axes or lettering; the halftone dpi is only for figures that are entirely photographic.
• Give each figure a Number before the final export, so the TIFF and PDF are named Figure1.tif and so on, the way submission systems expect.
• Turn on Column guides (G) and Align panels on their data regions for multi-panel time courses; the y axes then start at the same place.
• Use One shared colour key rather than a legend in every panel.
• Run the Colour-vision proof (P) before you send a figure out; it shows the same simulation the Check report measures.
• Prefer computed brackets from the Analyse bench to typed significance marks: a computed bracket can never print a p its test did not produce.
• Keep a Vault checkpoint before a risky change, and export the repro bundle with every submission.

Limits and known constraints

Troubleshooting

Related pages

• Figure analysis and statistics
• Exporting your work
• Charts and data-visualisation engines
• Moving work between studios
• Cloud sync, offline work and devices
• Version history and undo
• Lab and The Data and Statistics benches
• Science
• AI in flowss
• Plans and what they include
• Keyboard shortcuts
• The work model