[HN Gopher] Sparks: A typeface for creating sparklines in text w...
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       Sparks: A typeface for creating sparklines in text without code
        
       Author : boredgamer2
       Score  : 131 points
       Date   : 2020-05-06 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | kevincox wrote:
       | An interesting, but possibly not useful feature is that you can
       | copy the datapoints very easily.
        
         | swyx wrote:
         | i was gonna ask how but then i tried it... very cool! i agree
         | not very useful unless you want to do manual translation haha
        
         | njharman wrote:
         | I'd say that is super useful as someone who
         | 
         | 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.
        
       | arduinomancer wrote:
       | Can someone explain the advantage of doing this via text?
        
         | einpoklum wrote:
         | Not really, because the font on HN comments can't be set to
         | Sparks...
        
         | mattlondon wrote:
         | A couple of things that spring to mind:
         | 
         | - 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.
        
           | philjohn wrote:
           | Also gracefully degrades if the font isn't available for
           | whatever reason, you'd see:
           | 
           | {0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90}
        
       | Invictus0 wrote:
       | > See it working on our website or in one of our interactive
       | notebook examples
       | 
       | Just a note, the website link is 404'd.
        
         | jfim wrote:
         | Apparently the consultancy that built this closed their doors
         | in February of this year.
         | 
         | > 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.
        
       | leephillips wrote:
       | This is great. I think we're just seeing the beginning of the
       | crazy things that people are going to be doing by abusing (in the
       | best possible sense) opentype.
        
       | kaffeemitsahne wrote:
       | See also: FF Chartwell.
       | 
       | https://www.scribbletone.com/typefaces/ff-chartwell
        
       | ohazi wrote:
       | Does anyone know if Pango will render this? Could be a nice way
       | to build i3bar widgets.
        
       | sjbrown wrote:
       | We already have some rough glyphs for this: Unicode: 9601, 9602,
       | 9603, 9604, 9605, 9606, 9607, 9608
        
         | jfim wrote:
         | 9601-9608 decimal, so U+2581 [0] to U+2588 [1]. They're a bit
         | wide for a sparkline though.
         | 
         | [0] https://codepoints.net/U+2581
         | 
         | [1] https://codepoints.net/U+2588
        
           | ken wrote:
           | Any environment I have that does custom fonts and glyph
           | substitution also has CSS (or similar functionality) which
           | can be used to make them thinner, if desired.
           | 
           | 5.2 MB (compressed) is a big package just for some narrower
           | boxes.
        
             | yohannparis wrote:
             | 5.2 MB is for the whole set, if you are using this font in
             | a project, you will most likely set on one type of font
             | format (.eof, etc.) and one weight (extra-thin, bold.)
             | 
             | The font file ranges from 18Kb to ~600kb, with most in the
             | ~50kb, which is reasonable for the simplicity.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | michaelmior wrote:
         | While these can be helpful, I'm not sure how widespread the
         | availability is so you would probably want to provide these
         | glyphs anyway. (I could be wrong here. But I also don't know a
         | good way to assess their availability.) It's also quite nice
         | that you can just type in data with Sparks and get sparklines
         | which isn't possible with the glyphs you mentioned.
        
           | swyx wrote:
           | is there a resource to assess unicode glyph availability
           | across devices? something like a caniuse?
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | Lammy wrote:
       | It would be cool for the Readme to explain (without having to
       | click through to the website) what a sparkline is for those like
       | me who have no idea :)
        
         | seumars wrote:
         | Hey dad just type www.google.com yea dad two o's g-o-o-g-l-e at
         | the top of the window in that box yea dad same as you would for
         | facebook you know what nevermind just type sparkline no dad you
         | don't need www just sparkline and hit return on the keyboard
         | yea dad i mean enter but it says return on the keyboard alright
         | let me know if it works
        
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       (page generated 2020-05-06 23:00 UTC)