Sparks: A typeface for creating sparklines in text without code
github.com
github.com
It seems like there should be a generic way to say "put image X (SVG, PNG, whatever) on the screen here, as if it were a glyph, and also do scaling and linebreaks and alignment properly, oh and colors and so on". I expect this already exists somewhere deep inside CSS - does anyone know the story?
5.2 MB (compressed) is a big package just for some narrower boxes.
The font file ranges from 18Kb to ~600kb, with most in the ~50kb, which is reasonable for the simplicity.
There's a million things you can implement as a font. I have yet to see anything I think is a good idea to implement as a font except the defined glyph shapes themselves.
Just a note, the website link is 404'd.
> On February 25th, after a decade of business, we’ll be closing After the Flood to focus on other projects. We’d like to thank all of our clients and collaborators for their support.
1) cuts and pastes into plain text files often
2) often wishes to take data from charts and munge it, although sparklines are probably too informationally sparse to bother.
It still seems like an inferior solution to just using SVG, but it's not insanely bulky.
- super simple: no need to integrate a charting library or do server-side rendering
- performance: if you have a table of hundreds of rows each with a sparkline chart (e.g CPU load/QPS/error rate/etc for many nodes etc in a cluster), just some text will be hugely more performant that 100x charting widgets or 100x server-side rendered images.
{0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90}