4 ms·
A Font that Renders 14 types of Charts
- Brajeshwar 3y agoOne might be interested in “Font for rendering line chart data” that was on the homepage a few weeks back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39173438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39173438
- cchance 3y agoUmmm cool, but if browsers support dlig, and the font does what it says why are all the graphs on the page pictures instead of ... demos?
- chuckadams 3y agoIt's a commercial font, they don't want to make it so anyone can trivially grab it for free. Yes, you could find a site that actually uses the font for real, but it's much less obvious, so it still deters casual copying. You'd think they could at least show a few demos with a cut-down build, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- blackoil 3y agoHmm, maybe a demo font with watermark.
- ryanwhitney 3y agoLol, I haven’t seen that tried. One nice strategy these days is having downloadable trial fonts with limited character sets. Get to use it locally as much as you want, until you need a quotation mark or a dash, etc. Works great IMO—wish all foundries did so!
- jackson1442 3y agoI've also seen them flip certain symbols so you still get to experience the full font but it's still fundamentally "broken," for example the slashes might be flipped.
- jiveturkey 3y agoThat might be a feature ... http colon backslash backslash
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- simple10 3y agoThat was my immediate first question as well when visiting their site. "Where are the web fonts examples?" The PDF manual has the font embedded and it appears to render well. This is super cool! But I'm a bit stumped on the use case and intended audience.
- shayarma 3y agothis is so sick
- hresvelgr 3y ago[flagged]
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- splatzone 3y agoIncredibly cool, how is this even possible?
- chuckadams 3y agoA font is basically arbitrary vector graphics, and ligatures expand the available number of those graphics to as many as you want (ligatures can be whole words, not just letter pairs)
- autoexecbat 3y agoIs there interesting use cases, or is more of a fun hack?
- nagonago 3y agoI had the same question, as my first reaction was "this looks like such a hack, I am sure there are better tools for this," so I poked into the user manual[0] and found this quote: > Driven by the frustration of creating charts within design applications and inspired by typefaces such as Beowolf and PicLig, Travis Kochel saw an opportunity to take advantage of OpenType technology to simplify the process. Reading between the lines, "design applications" is very likely referring mostly to Adobe InDesign and Illustrator. I can see it being useful for the (somewhat niche?) use case that the creator had, which is quickly creating simple charts within Adobe products. [0] https://assets.vectrotype.com/specimens/Chartwell-Manual-24-01-24.pdf https://assets.vectrotype.com/specimens/Chartwell-Manual-24-...
- not-my-account 3y agoFun, if you leave the website open but have focus elsewhere for a minute or two, a screen saver pops up!
- jiveturkey 3y agoneato! Should this more properly be called a canvas saver?
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoThat's very ingenious. I wonder how bad performance is though.
- mrb 3y agoThis is the opposite of what you think. This is probably 10x faster to render than a traditional image chart. Font rendering engines are extremely well optimized. The downside is not going to be poor performance but lack of flexibility. You want borders around pie chart slices? Not possible.
- dhosek 3y agoAlthough the big problem here is one of accessibility. With traditional graphics, you can use alt text to provide information for low/no-vision users. The plain-text rendition of the input ends up not being particularly helpful. This is part of why Github moved to SVG icons from its font-based icons. The former is more easily made accessible.
- lIIllIIllIIllII 3y agothe chart type is the font, and the data is literally the text you type, so the chart itself is alt text this is like, maximally accessible
- lifthrasiir 3y agoThe data is not necessarily same as what you type because it has to be normalized first. And it will lack any labels.
- dhosek 3y agoThey show the input. I would not consider that to be usable for a human reader. Add in that you’re relying on visual cues to connect the numbers to the legend and it’s even less useful to the human reader. Consider the simple case of a two-item pie chart which would be, say, <font color="red">40</font>+<font color="blue">60</blue> followed by somewhere else <font color="red">lemurs</font> and <font color="blue">cows</font>. That doesn’t seem very accessible compared to an alt text on an image that reads “pie chart showing fraction of lemurs (40) and cows (60).”
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- ChrisArchitect 3y ago(2011)