Figure Composer

What the Figure Composer is

A finished figure in a paper is usually several smaller figures arranged on one page with panel labels, a few arrows, and a caption. The Figure Composer is the surface that does that last step inside ResearchOS. It lives at /figures and pulls panels straight from the work you already have, so you assemble a publication figure without exporting images out to a separate design tool and stitching them back together.

The page is measured in real inches on a real paper size, so what you see on screen is what the journal gets. Nothing about the figure is a screenshot. Every panel stays a true vector, and the whole page exports as one scalable file.

Panel sources

The composer pulls panels from four parts of your workspace. Each source exposes the same placing, resizing, and labeling interface, and each re-renders from the original data whenever the source changes.

• Sequences. A panel from the Sequences library renders as a linear or circular sequence map, with features, annotations, and primer sites exactly as the full sequence viewer shows them.
• Chemistry. A panel from the Chemistry library renders the molecule as a 2D chemical structure diagram.
• Phylogenetics. A panel from the Tree Studio renders the saved tree with all its layers (annotation tracks, color strips, metadata heatmaps) using the same native renderer.
• Data Hub. A panel from a Data Hub table renders one of its saved plots (bar chart, scatter, histogram, and so on). The figure math stays in the Data Hub engine; the composer only places the rendered output.

Panels are live, not pasted

When you add a figure to the page, you are not pasting a flat picture. You are placing a live panel that knows where it came from. All four panel sources re-render from their source when the source changes. This is the part most figure tools cannot do, because they only ever see a finished image. ResearchOS keeps the data behind the panel, so the figure and the underlying record stay connected.

Panels are labeled automatically in reading order, top row first and then left to right, in your choice of A B C, a b c, or 1 2 3 style. You drag panels to position them, resize from the corner, and an optional snap-to-grid keeps everything aligned.

Per-panel style inspector

Selecting a panel opens its style inspector. Each source exposes the controls that make sense for it. A sequence map panel lets you toggle features and annotation tracks. A chemistry panel has no style options (the 2D structure is self-contained). A phylogenetic tree panel exposes scale bar, tip-label visibility, and branch-color column. A Data Hub plot panel exposes the plot's palette. The controls mirror what the source exposes in its own viewer, so what you tune here is the same dial you would turn in the full editor.

Style changes apply only to that panel in the figure, not back to the source, so adjusting a palette for the figure does not change the Data Hub table.

The page frame and the canvas

A paper preset sets the page to a standard physical size. Seven presets cover the common cases.

• Letter (8.5 x 11 in)
• A4 (8.27 x 11.69 in)
• Legal (8.5 x 14 in)
• Journal single column (3.5 in wide)
• Journal double column (7.2 in wide)
• Slide 16:9 (13.3 x 7.5 in)
• Square (6 x 6 in)

Portrait and landscape orientations are available for each, and a custom width and height field covers anything the presets do not. The white sheet is the export region, so anything on it is in the figure and anything off it is just working space. The canvas pans and zooms the same way the Phylogenetics Tree Studio and the Data Hub graph editor do, with a fit control, a zoom readout, and a minimap when you are zoomed in.

Undo

Every placement, resize, drag, style change, and panel deletion is undoable. The toolbar carries an Undo button that steps back through the session history one action at a time. There is no redo; undo covers the whole history of the current editing session.

Annotations and icons

A small set of annotation tools covers what figures usually need on top of the panels: text labels, arrows, and brackets, placed directly on the page and exported as part of the vector. Beyond annotations, an optional icon library lets you drop scientific icons onto the figure, recolor them, and resize or rotate them like any other element.

Export

The whole page exports as a single vector SVG at publication resolution, so the lines stay crisp at any size and the file drops straight into a manuscript or a slide. Because the panels are true vectors rather than rasterized images, the export is the figure itself, not a photograph of it. A PNG export is also available for slides and print where a raster is required.

See the Data Hub and Phylogenetics pages for the data figures those panels come from.