The vellum graphics ecosystem • vellumverse

vellumverse installs and loads the vellum graphics ecosystem in one step, the way tidyverse does for data science. Its packages carry a shared metaphor:

package	role	analogy
vellum	low-level graphics backend, a Rust scene graph, unit/layout engine, and PNG/SVG/PDF renderer	`grid`
vellumplot	pipe-first grammar of graphics that compiles a plot spec into a vellum scene	`ggplot2`
vellumwidget	client-side interactive HTML widgets for the scenes they produce	`plotly`/`htmlwidgets`

vellum is the parchment, vellumplot is the pen, and vellumwidget is the annotation revealed on the page.

Installation

The ecosystem compiles a Rust crate (in vellum), so you need a Rust toolchain (cargo/rustc) alongside R. Then:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("r-vellum/vellumverse")

Usage

library(vellumverse)
#> ── Attaching packages ──────────────────────────────────── vellumverse 0.1.0 ──
#> ✔ vellum 0.1.0   ✔ vellumplot 0.1.0   ✔ vellumwidget 0.1.0

That single call attaches all three core packages, so you can go from a data frame to an interactive plot in one pipeline:

library(vellumverse)

df <- data.frame(wt = mtcars$wt, mpg = mtcars$mpg, model = rownames(mtcars))

vplot(df) |>                                     # vellumplot: grammar of graphics
  mark_point(x = wt, y = mpg, color = mpg,
             tooltip = model, data_id = model) |>
  scale_color_continuous() |>
  as_widget()                                    # vellumwidget: interactive widget

vplot(), mark_point(), and the scales come from vellumplot; as_widget() comes from vellumwidget; both compile down to a vellum scene.

Helpers

vellumverse_packages()    # the packages vellumverse bundles
vellumverse_conflicts()   # functions masked across the ecosystem

To load the packages without the startup banner, set options(vellumverse.quiet = TRUE) before attaching.