[Feature Request] Visualizing dimensions

[Hoeze]

Hi, I'm curious how you created your logo:

I'd like to create visualizations of the dimensions in my dataset similar to your logo.
Having a functionality simplifying this task would be a very useful feature in xarray.

[jhamman]

I think this logo is generated using Latex (source).

I do think it would be cool if we could visualize the dimensionality/composition of xarray datasets with some sort of ds.visualize() method. How would one go about doing this though? How would you handle higher dimension datasets?

[Hoeze]

In general, I'd work with data "lego blocks".
Visualizations up to three dimensions would be self-explaining.
One block = scalar, a row of blocks = vector, a plane of blocks = matrix, a cuboid of blocks = 3D array.

Different variables can then be aligned along each dimension (similar to the red and orange planes aligned to the right side of the pink cuboid)

More than three dimensions could be handled by placing multiple cuboid-blocks (like the blue and pink cuboid in the logo).

The relational sizes of different dimensions should be chosen carefully, maybe with some non-linear scaling?
Or we could separate large dimensions in the middle:

(just an illustration, drawing what I'd like to have in libreoffice is hard)

However, I'm not sure how to realize that...

[Hoeze]

Some weeks ago I tried to solve this using a Latex-Script generator (https://github.com/Hoeze/matrixtolatex), but I gave it up as it was too hard for me to create 3D figures with LaTex.
I think having this built on top of a senseful plotting framework would be a lot easier.

[TomNicholas]

I gave it up as it was too hard for me to create 3D figures with LaTex

There is a 3dtikz package I think?

Is this issue now superceded by the discussion going on in #1820?