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Comment by dkyc | Hacker News Reader

Awesome to see this here! I’m one of the co-founders, open for any questions.

We’re also always looking for developers to join our team (Berlin-based, remote welcome, 4d week possible) - email me david@datawrapper for details.

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@david this looks great. On the mapping viz features, I quickly glanced and saw squares for thematic and choropleth designs. Hexagons are well-suited for this and can convey a denser amount of information: https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/insider/thematic-mapping...

Have you had many requests for the ability to add data to a narrative from datasets? We built this for seekwell (https://doc.seekwell.io/stories) and people really like it for daily or weekly text based business updates.

I'd think this would be useful in media for a story they want to keep the numbers live in.

Definitely - all Datawrapper visualisations can also be used with live data sources (https://academy.datawrapper.de/article/317-live-updates-over...). It used to be a bit of a fringe feature for things like elections or sports events, but since Covid reporting started it became a very dominant use case.

The ‚narrative‘ concept looks super interesting!

Is there an API to get charts to/from a site without having to go through the Datawrapper site to generate? Especially on Google Sheets-linked charts. Would be nice to one-click generate new charts through an embedded API on our site.

Yes, there’s a REST API that lets you do that, documented here: https://developer.datawrapper.de/

Available on the free plan as well!

Hi, do you allow startups to embed this into their product to offer to their customers as a chart builder solution without requiring them to create their own account?like an oem approach?

Hey! At the moment, we solely focus on providing the best experience for our direct users, but we have received requests like this in the past, so it might be something to consider in the future. Happy to chat about details (email in my profile) if you want to.

Very neat product! I especially like your Maps app (I myself built TravelMap.net).

Are all your maps static?

Do you generate and host your OSM vector tiles yourself?

What do you mean by static?

Yes, the tiles for our locator maps [0] are self-generated and hosted based on OSM source data and the OpenMapTiles project.

The boundaries used for choropleths [1] are maintained by us based on various public sources (NaturalEarthData, OSM, government data, …)

[0] https://www.datawrapper.de/maps/locator-map [1] https://www.datawrapper.de/maps/choropleth-map

Can you zoom in and drag your locator maps around once embedded? I only see images being generated

The maps are rendered live (not as images), which is needed for responsiveness, but they are not draggable/zoomable. This is a product decision based on the explanatory/storytelling nature of the feature, we go into more detail here: https://academy.datawrapper.de/article/216-why-its-not-possi...

Congrats on building such a great product!

Do you support waterfall charts?

Thank you! It’s not a core chart type at the moment, but you can hack it using stacked column charts: https://academy.datawrapper.de/article/333-how-to-create-a-w...

Might become one at some point!

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