Information visualization rests on the idea that a meaningful relationship can be drawn between pixels and data. This is most often mediated by geometric entities (such as circles, squares and text) but always involves pixels eventually to display. In most systems, the pixels are tucked away under levels of abstraction in the rendering system. Abstract Rendering takes the opposite approach: expose the pixels and gain powerful pixel-level control. This pixel-level power is a complement to many existing visualization techniques. It is an elaboration on rendering, not an analytic or projection step, so it can be used as epilogue to many existing techniques.

In standard rendering, geometric objects are projected to an image and represented on that image's discrete pixels. The source space is a canvas that contains logically continuous geometric primitives and the target space is an image that contains discrete colors. Abstract Rendering fits between these two states. It introduces a discretization of the data at the pixel-level, but not necessarily all the way to colors. This enables many pixel-level concerns to be efficiently and concisely captured.

This repository is a Python implementation of the abstract rendering framework. For more details on the conceptual framework and examples of applications, please see the more general repository. Sample images can be found in the central wiki.