StratumFrom Default Chart to Publication Figure
A default chart answers your question. A figure has to answer it for someone else. Here's the trip from one to the other without leaving Stratum.
housing_market.csv — 1,500 home listings across five cities with list price, living area, property type and more.
Download the CSV.Stratum 1.5 adds the inspector's Display section used below; everything else works from 1.4.
Start with Charts ▸ Relationship ▸ Scatter: Y Columns = ListPrice, X Columns = SqFt, Partition = City, and on the Trend chip a Linear fit with Each Sub-Group on. That's a correct chart. Its title is a column name, its axes say SqFt and ListPrice, and the story — that a square foot costs about three times as much in Bellhaven as in Dunmore — is left for the reader to find. Everything below is cosmetic, so it lives in one place, away from the control bar that sets up the analysis.
Open the inspector, and keep it open
Click Inspector in the toolbar. It docks beside the chart rather than floating over it, so every edit lands live while you look at the result. Its tabs follow the chart: Chart, Axes, Series, Annotations for overlays such as fit lines, Notes, and Legend. In a gallery, click one panel to style just that cell; the rest keep inheriting the chart-wide settings.
Words first
On the Chart tab, the Title, Subtitle and Footer fields show the auto-generated text as a placeholder; type to replace it. Make the title the finding (Each extra square foot costs 3× more in Bellhaven than in Dunmore), put the method in the subtitle, and the source in the footer. On Axes, give X Axis and Y Axis real titles with units, and set the Axis Range or Log Scale if the default extent wastes space.
Every text element takes its own Font size, weight and italic, plus Color and Align. App-wide defaults live in Preferences ▸ Charts (title 18 pt, axis titles 15 pt, tick labels 12 pt), so set a house style once rather than per chart. Stratum doesn't offer a typeface choice for chart text; it's about hierarchy, not fonts.
Color that survives the printer
On Series, each city gets its own Color, symbol Size, Filled and Opacity. The color picker offers the chart palette, a standard grid, your recent picks and a custom color, and the same picker is used everywhere in the app.
Then scroll the Chart tab to Display, new in 1.5: the chart's own appearance switches, moved out of the control bar. For a partitioned scatter that's Symbols by Group — a distinct marker per city, so the figure still reads when a journal prints it in grayscale. (A box plot's equivalent is Use Symbols for Data Group; a pie's are Donut and Explode Largest.)
Point at what matters
The Notes tab holds stamps — Text Note, Rectangle, Oval and, on charts with two real data axes, Zoom Loupe. Drag one onto the plot (or right-click the plot for Add Note Here and friends). Double-click a note to edit it in place, right-click it for Add Arrow, then drag the arrowhead onto the point you mean — here the most expensive listing. Notes are anchored to the plot area, so they keep their place when the chart resizes.
The loupe solves the crowded corner every scatter has. Draw its dashed box over the small homes under 1,000 sq ft, where five cities overlap, and Stratum re-renders that region magnified in a panel you can drag anywhere, including into the margin. Tick Range labels to print the magnified extent in the panel's corners. It works on Scatter, Bubble, Trend, Q-Q, ECDF, the PCA Biplot, the Correspondence Map and the control charts.
If what you want is to name points from a column, that's the Labels control on the chart itself — see how to label points on a chart. And if your groups come from row colors rather than a partition, here's how the two differ.
Export at the size you were asked for
Click Export… in the toolbar (⇧⌘E on the Mac). Pick a Format — PNG, JPEG, TIFF or PDF — then a Scale (1× (screen), 2× (retina), 3× (print)) and an Aspect: Document, Document, wide, 16:9 (video / slides), 9:16 (vertical video), 4:3 (slides) or Square. Under the picker the sheet prints the result before you save — Exports at 3840 × 2160 px (1280 × 720 @ 3×). — because 16:9 at 3× is exactly 4K, at 2× 1440p, at 1× 720p.
- TIFF is there because submission systems ask for it by name. It's LZW-compressed and carries a resolution tag of 72 dpi × the scale. A "300 dpi" requirement is really a pixel count at print size: 3× Document, wide is 3,840 × 2,580 px, about 12.8 inches wide at 300 dpi.
- PDF is true vector. There's no SVG or EPS export; PDF covers what EPS was for, and none of the journals we checked takes EPS but refuses PDF.
- PNG for slides and the web. Set the default format, scale and aspect in Preferences ▸ Charts ▸ Export, and Copy and drag-out produce the same size.
Frequently asked questions
Which file formats can Stratum export charts in?
PNG, JPEG, TIFF and PDF, on Mac and Windows. PDF is the vector format; there is no SVG or EPS export.
How do I export a chart at 300 dpi for a journal?
A dpi requirement is a pixel count at the printed size: 300 dpi across a 7-inch column is 2,100 pixels. The Export sheet shows the exact pixel size for the format, scale and aspect you pick; at 3× the Document, wide aspect is 3,840 × 2,580 pixels. The resolution tag inside the file reads 72 dpi times the scale, so 216 dpi at 3×.
Can I export a chart in 4K?
Yes. Choose 16:9 (video / slides) at 3×: exactly 3,840 × 2,160 pixels. At 1× and 2× the same preset gives 720p and 1440p.
Do annotations and the zoom loupe appear in exported charts?
Yes. Notes, arrows, highlight shapes and the magnified loupe panel are drawn by the same routine on screen and in export. Only the editing handles stay on screen.
Can I change the font of a chart?
You can set each text element's size, weight, italic, color and alignment, per chart or as app-wide defaults in Preferences. Stratum doesn't offer a choice of typeface for chart text.
Related: How to Make a Scatter Plot → · Label Points on a Chart → · Violin vs Box Plot →