A Visual Language For Finance Patterns | Hacker News Reader

A Visual Language For Finance Patterns

saintsal.com

36 pointsSaintSal3 comments

SaintSal: It's a good start but apart of semantics (icons with meaning) you also need a grammar to call it a language. In case of visual language it means that there is a way of merging simple glyphs into more complicated icon. Here is an article that describe how it can be done in medicine:

http://www.sd.polyu.edu.hk/iasdr/proceeding/papers/Collabora...

I'm looking for an open source project that I could use in my applications. There is http://thenounproject.com/ but it does not have grammar. The merging of icons is done for you (e.g., the iron icon with one, two, or three dots)

Thanks, that's really helpful. I hadn't thought of grammar explicitly, mainly because I was more focused on something like design patterns.

So far, the emergent grammar has been: equity and/or balance sheet, then an event or a profit/loss, then back to equity and/or balance sheet.

I'd like to see what people try to do with this before insisting on a grammer, so you're right, maybe calling it a visual language is overstating where things are at the moment.

Very cool idea.

On a technical note, you could define three macros

   \equity{10}{90}
   % where the units are percentages,  and
   \balance{8}{10}
   \RandC{8}{10}
   % where the units are in mm

and use this level of abstraction in your source code. I suggest, the diagrams in a separate column to support the narration, but with tikz you could even put them inline.

These examples should get you started if you want to "program" your graphics: http://piratepad.net/GVsgD6x5D3

Speaking of power tools for graphics, check out also http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/piscript/ and the there-associated book http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/graphics/manual/

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