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<h1>Chaco Documentation<a class="headerlink" href="#chaco-documentation" title="Permalink to this headline">ΒΆ</a></h1>
<p>Chaco is a Python toolkit for building interactive 2-D visualizations. It
includes renderers for many popular plot types, built-in implementations of
common interactions with those plots, and a framework for extending and
customizing plots and interactions. Chaco can also render graphics in a
non-interactive fashion to images, in either raster or vector formats, and it
has a subpackage for doing command-line plotting or simple scripting.</p>
<p>Chaco is built on three other Enthought packages:</p>
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<li><a class="reference external" href="http://code.enthought.com/projects/traits">Traits</a>, as an event
notification framework</li>
<li>Kiva, for rendering 2-D graphics to a variety of backends across platforms</li>
<li>Enable, as a framework for writing interactive visual components, and for
abstracting away GUI-toolkit-specific details of mouse and keyboard
handling</li>
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<p>Currently, Chaco requires either wxPython or PyQt to display interactive plots,
but a cross-platform OpenGL backend (using Pyglet) is in the works, and it will
not require WX or Qt.</p>
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