Skip to content
Oliver Herrmann edited this page Sep 5, 2017 · 19 revisions

RAW is an open source web tool developed at the DensityDesign Research Lab (Politecnico di Milano) to create custom vector-based visualizations on top of the amazing d3.js library by Mike Bostock. Primarily conceived as a tool for designers and vis geeks, RAW aims at providing a missing link between spreadsheet applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, OpenRefine) and vector graphics editors (e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, ...).

RAW works with delimiter-separated values (i.e. csv and tsv files) as well as with copied-and-pasted texts from other applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel, TextWrangler, TextEdit). Based on the svg format, visualizations can be easily imported in and edited with vector graphics applications for further refinements, or directly embedded into web pages.

Knowing the need of working with sensitive information, the data uploaded to RAW is processed only by the web browser: no server-side operation or storage are performed - no one will see, touch or copy your data!

RAW is also highly customizable and extensible, accepting new custom charts defined by users. For more information about how to add or edit charts, see the Developer Guide. For a complete documentation see API Reference.

Resources

Installation

If you want to run your instance of Raw locally on your machine, be sure you have the following requirements installed.

Requirements

Clone Raw from the command line:

$ git clone git://github.com/densitydesign/raw.git

browse to Raw root folder:

$ cd raw

install client-side dependencies:

$ bower install

You can now access Raw from any local web server. For example, you can run Python's built-in server:

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 4000

or for Python 3+

$ python -m http.server 4000

Once this is running, go to http://localhost:4000/.

Troubles with the installation? Maybe a look at the issues page can solve your problem, otherwise reach us on the Google group