[HN Gopher] Sparks: A typeface for creating sparklines in text w... ___________________________________________________________________ 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 ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-05-06 23:00 UTC)