Nice, but the terms were new to me. Would have helped to explain them first.
Nice, but the terms were new to me. Would have helped to explain them first.
Tufte has written up a history here: https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/sparklines-history-by-t...
This tool doesn't really create sparklines, but it does create small charts, although given it is delivered via custom font, it's usefulness is limited.
* And anyone interested in displaying information is doing themselves a disservice without a copy of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Tufte.
The gif at the top doesn’t demonstrate everything included. From the text:
“There are currently three variations: bars, dots, and dot-lines (line charts with tiny dots at the joints between segments), each of which has five weight variants.”
See also their examples page: https://beta.observablehq.com/@tomgp/after-the-flood-i-spark...
I’d call delivery as ligatures a trade-off. Much easier to make it scale with text on the web when embedded inline, it’ll match the text colour for free, and the underlying numeric data are trivially retrievable and machine-readable. Compare the example on the Sparkline wikipedia page, which don’t scale with the text and are almost invisible when using their own dark mode.
That explains the "lines" part, but whence the "sparks"?
Cool, I guess, but no spark-line.
Also, Google is a thing.