5 ms·

Shades of FF Chartwell, which is one of those amazing things you just think to yourself "well, this is going to take over the world of design and GUI's and so o

by mmjaa 8y ago

Shades of FF Chartwell, which is one of those amazing things you just think to yourself "well, this is going to take over the world of design and GUI's and so on", only .. for some reason, it doesn't: https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/ https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/ "FF Chartwell is a set of three fonts* that together create a remarkable set of tools for creating bar, line, and pie charts. It uses OpenType ligatures to perform its magic – a series of numbers can be transformed into clean, perfectly rendered graphs, as you type." Having used Chartwell for a few projects, I'm fairly convinced that this ligature trick is the way all GUI's should be done. In fact I've got this hypothesis going, that every GUI toolkit/method is eventually just going to re-invent ligatures and type... ;)

taeric 8y ago
Why? That seemed a trick in search of a problem. I mean, I get having a small dsl for describing charts. That is why we have quite a plethora of them. They usually have more complexity than you'd hope, because it is a complex problem. But spark lines, you might protest. Of ridiculous niche value and really need to be super high resolution. The point is to pack a ton of density. If you are just showing a few numbers, consider just showing the numbers. And if you haven't used the likes of metapost, graphviz, etc., Give them a try.
- mmjaa 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm quite familiar with these toolkits. (Been at it 30 years, yo.) The thing about the ligature trick, and fonts in general, and more specifically the packing of known functional GUI elements into a broader ligature description, is that its human readable/comprehendible without also requiring a great deal of 'programming'. Well, in fact Chartwell "is" programming, or at least coding (not Turing..) of information in a reproducible way - and the fact that we use the language of glyphs as a GUI metaphor, is also appealing. My affinity for this approach is that it is tied to human symbol-making in an intrinsic, self-describing way; whereas a technical GUI system might consists of a multi-variate collection of abstractions, putting it all into glyphs and ligatures ties it into our most basic of operational agilities, reading and writing. Not, compiling, hacking, code, transmogrifying, mutating, extending, abstraction, tool-pushing, etc., but rather "describe this in glyphs/ligatures like every language ever, or GTFO>.." I mean, WIMP has its thing, and touch and mobile too, but I do wonder if there isn't something to a pure graphemes and symbols based mode of interaction... which I would argue is where we are heading, with our multiple-gigabyte OS updates, anyway .. when we could nevertheless be doing it in <128k.
  - taeric 8y ago
    I think you are seriously abusing "describe this in glyphs/ligatures". In particular, there is a reason "a picture is worth a thousand words." :) Some things are simply more easily done outside of the standard glyphs we use for words. I don't expect this will ever change. And I shudder at all of the complexity added to our glyph systems to support efforts at making "one true language" that can do everything.
    - mmjaa 8y ago
      Oh, no question there is abuse going on here - this thought experiment is really reaching and extending beyond a certain horizon, which may or may not be idiotic. ;) Perhaps you're familiar with the wonderful and super-crazy TempleOS? There are some great things about the way the UI is expressed there .. >Some things are simply more easily done outside of the standard glyphs we use for words. I don't expect this will ever change. And I shudder at all of the complexity added to our glyph systems to support efforts at making "one true language" that can do everything. Certainly a valid concern, and I acknowledge your conservatism, but I think you might want to look at the cyclomatic complexity of the work required to splash a modern GUI up on the screen, and compare it with the cyclomatic complexity required to render a human-readable string of glyphs. There is a lot of opportunity to optimise these processes - and I would wager that having a font full of glyphs required to construct a UI paradigm, having those primitive elements processed by the OS in a simple way, and giving those elements to the end-user (who admittedly would need to learn something new for it to be productive), may indeed produced a "simpler" interaction method for future users. Yes, there is a certain fallacy to the "one true language" approach - but if you pay careful attention, you'll notice that the OS's of most common use in the last 10 years are on that road, anyway. Break this out of the box a little, lets move from glyph/grapheme/font territory - what if the entire OS was instead expressed with SVG files? I think this is a viable thought experiment, personally.
      - taeric 8y ago
        Most modern gui toolkits bother me in ways that I can't adequately express. All the more so because most fallback to thinking CSS is the answer. Often completely ignoring what you can easily accomplish if you are willing to use absolute positioning, oddly enough! Seriously, I don't think CSS is the worst answer. However, trying to get everything to work with some default flow behavior is borderline insanity. More, it is completely unnecessary. My favorite example lately has been http://taeric.github.io/cube-permutations-1.html http://taeric.github.io/cube-permutations-1.html for how you can layout using absolute positioning perfectly fine. (I similarly did sudoku with minimal effort using similar markup.) But the worst sin is the sheer instability of what we are building as our foundation. The box and glue methods of TeX might not be the most intuitive method, nor the most powerful. However, it is nice that they have been stable. And not just in the "doesn't crash" sense of the word. In the, "I would feel comfortable building on top of it" sense. So, let me be clear that I'm skeptical, but I would be delighted to be proved wrong.
bmpafa 8y ago
I don't want to get too technical in my assessment here, but: holy shit that's cool.
SippinLean 8y ago
This article is more about typographic considerations for charts, not replacing graphics. Chartwell is a neat hack made by clever people, but on the web we should eschew icon fonts. Your interface should not rely on custom typefaces making it to and being displayed by your visitor's browser. Github did a great writeup on the issues: https://blog.github.com/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/ https://blog.github.com/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-...
- GordonS 8y ago
  Another option is rendering images of charts created with Chartwell and publishing those

by mmjaa 8y ago

taeric 8y ago

Why? That seemed a trick in search of a problem. I mean, I get having a small dsl for describing charts. That is why we have quite a plethora of them. They usually have more complexity than you'd hope, because it is a complex problem. But spark lines, you might protest. Of ridiculous niche value and really need to be super high resolution. The point is to pack a ton of density. If you are just showing a few numbers, consider just showing the numbers. And if you haven't used the likes of metapost, graphviz, etc., Give them a try.

mmjaa 8y ago
Yeah, I'm quite familiar with these toolkits. (Been at it 30 years, yo.) The thing about the ligature trick, and fonts in general, and more specifically the packing of known functional GUI elements into a broader ligature description, is that its human readable/comprehendible without also requiring a great deal of 'programming'. Well, in fact Chartwell "is" programming, or at least coding (not Turing..) of information in a reproducible way - and the fact that we use the language of glyphs as a GUI metaphor, is also appealing. My affinity for this approach is that it is tied to human symbol-making in an intrinsic, self-describing way; whereas a technical GUI system might consists of a multi-variate collection of abstractions, putting it all into glyphs and ligatures ties it into our most basic of operational agilities, reading and writing. Not, compiling, hacking, code, transmogrifying, mutating, extending, abstraction, tool-pushing, etc., but rather "describe this in glyphs/ligatures like every language ever, or GTFO>.." I mean, WIMP has its thing, and touch and mobile too, but I do wonder if there isn't something to a pure graphemes and symbols based mode of interaction... which I would argue is where we are heading, with our multiple-gigabyte OS updates, anyway .. when we could nevertheless be doing it in <128k.
- taeric 8y ago
  I think you are seriously abusing "describe this in glyphs/ligatures". In particular, there is a reason "a picture is worth a thousand words." :) Some things are simply more easily done outside of the standard glyphs we use for words. I don't expect this will ever change. And I shudder at all of the complexity added to our glyph systems to support efforts at making "one true language" that can do everything.
  - mmjaa 8y ago
    Oh, no question there is abuse going on here - this thought experiment is really reaching and extending beyond a certain horizon, which may or may not be idiotic. ;) Perhaps you're familiar with the wonderful and super-crazy TempleOS? There are some great things about the way the UI is expressed there .. >Some things are simply more easily done outside of the standard glyphs we use for words. I don't expect this will ever change. And I shudder at all of the complexity added to our glyph systems to support efforts at making "one true language" that can do everything. Certainly a valid concern, and I acknowledge your conservatism, but I think you might want to look at the cyclomatic complexity of the work required to splash a modern GUI up on the screen, and compare it with the cyclomatic complexity required to render a human-readable string of glyphs. There is a lot of opportunity to optimise these processes - and I would wager that having a font full of glyphs required to construct a UI paradigm, having those primitive elements processed by the OS in a simple way, and giving those elements to the end-user (who admittedly would need to learn something new for it to be productive), may indeed produced a "simpler" interaction method for future users. Yes, there is a certain fallacy to the "one true language" approach - but if you pay careful attention, you'll notice that the OS's of most common use in the last 10 years are on that road, anyway. Break this out of the box a little, lets move from glyph/grapheme/font territory - what if the entire OS was instead expressed with SVG files? I think this is a viable thought experiment, personally.
    - taeric 8y ago
      Most modern gui toolkits bother me in ways that I can't adequately express. All the more so because most fallback to thinking CSS is the answer. Often completely ignoring what you can easily accomplish if you are willing to use absolute positioning, oddly enough! Seriously, I don't think CSS is the worst answer. However, trying to get everything to work with some default flow behavior is borderline insanity. More, it is completely unnecessary. My favorite example lately has been http://taeric.github.io/cube-permutations-1.html http://taeric.github.io/cube-permutations-1.html for how you can layout using absolute positioning perfectly fine. (I similarly did sudoku with minimal effort using similar markup.) But the worst sin is the sheer instability of what we are building as our foundation. The box and glue methods of TeX might not be the most intuitive method, nor the most powerful. However, it is nice that they have been stable. And not just in the "doesn't crash" sense of the word. In the, "I would feel comfortable building on top of it" sense. So, let me be clear that I'm skeptical, but I would be delighted to be proved wrong.

bmpafa 8y ago

I don't want to get too technical in my assessment here, but: holy shit that's cool.

SippinLean 8y ago

This article is more about typographic considerations for charts, not replacing graphics. Chartwell is a neat hack made by clever people, but on the web we should eschew icon fonts. Your interface should not rely on custom typefaces making it to and being displayed by your visitor's browser. Github did a great writeup on the issues: https://blog.github.com/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/ https://blog.github.com/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-...

GordonS 8y ago
Another option is rendering images of charts created with Chartwell and publishing those