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OP discusses the below-the-baseline issue describes it as “annoying but not a deal breaker”.

If this is a deal breaker because you’re aspiring for Edward Tufte levels of visualization purity, OP also offers an alternative that omits below-the-baseline U+2584 and U+2588. The trade off is having fewer unequally sized buckets for the data.

(Could there be font faces without this rendering issue?)

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> (Could there be font faces without this rendering issue?)

A comment under OP suggests that the rendering issue is font-dependent. When I view a Unicode sparkline on a test page [1], the rendering issue occurs using Arial, Courier New, Gill Sans, Helvetica, or Times New Roman, but appears to be fixed if I use Georgia, Menlo, or Comic Sans.

[1]: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sparkline_in_unicode

If you're going to pick a font to avoid this issue you might as well as define your own custom sparkline font with fancy ligatures.

That’s a very interesting idea. Apparently, someone has actually tried this [1] and it looks pretty good [2].

[1]: https://github.com/aftertheflood/sparks

[2]: https://observablehq.com/@tomgp/after-the-flood-i-sparks-i-t...

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