BLAND — Elixir Technical Drawing

Pure-Elixir library for paper-ready, monochrome, hatch-patterned technical plots in the visual tradition of 1960s–80s engineering reports.

BLAND emits SVG. Plots look at home next to a title block, a set of fastener callouts, and a stack of punched cards — black ink on white paper, serif type, thin rules, hatched fills. No color, no gradients, no drop shadows.

See the gallery for every plot type at a glance.

xs = Enum.map(0..100, &(&1 / 10.0))

fig =
  Bland.figure(size: :a5_landscape, title: "Damped oscillation")
  |> Bland.axes(xlabel: "t [s]", ylabel: "x(t)")
  |> Bland.line(xs, Enum.map(xs, &(:math.exp(-&1/4) * :math.cos(&1))), label: "response")
  |> Bland.line(xs, Enum.map(xs, &(:math.exp(-&1/4))), label: "envelope", stroke: :dashed)
  |> Bland.hline(0.0, stroke: :dotted)
  |> Bland.legend(position: :top_right)
  |> Bland.title_block(
    project: "BLAND Reference",
    title:   "Fig. 1 · Damped oscillation",
    drawn_by: "JM",
    date:    "2026-04-21",
    scale:   "1:1",
    sheet:   "1 of 1",
    rev:     "A"
  )

Bland.write!(fig, "oscillation.svg")

Why monochrome?

• Prints clean. Plots look the same on a laser printer, a color printer, and a photocopy. No "figure is unreadable in the proceedings" surprises.
• Accessible by default. Hatching, stroke dashing, and marker shape distinguish series — so plots survive grayscale rendering and are legible to readers with color vision deficiency.

Features

• Series: line, scatter, bar (grouped), area, reference rules
• Hatch patterns: 15 presets plus a define/3 helper for custom fills
• Markers: 12 shape presets (open / filled / open-cross variants)
• Stroke dashes: solid, dashed, dotted, dash-dot, long-dash, fine
• Paper presets: A4, A5, Letter, Legal, Square — portrait & landscape
• Themes: :report_1972 (serif), :blueprint (mono), :gazette (news)
• Engineering title block with project / drawn-by / date / scale / sheet / revision
• Annotations: in-data text and arrows
• Linear and log axes with nice-rounded tick placement
• Pure-Elixir output — no Python, no Node, no canvas libraries

Installation

The package is published on Hex as bland and can be added to your project as follows:

def deps do
  [
    {:bland, "~> 0.2.1"}
  ]
end

BLAND has no runtime dependencies on its own but requires kino when used in a Livebook.

Using it from Livebook

Mix.install([
  {:bland, "~> 0.2.1"},
  {:kino, "~> 0.14"}
])

Bland.figure() |> Bland.line([1, 2, 3], [1, 4, 9]) |> Bland.to_kino()

See notebooks/showcase.livemd for a full walk-through.

Documentation

• Getting started
• Patterns and hatching
• Styling and themes
• Paper output

Full API docs: run mix docs and open doc/index.html.

License

MIT.