Sparks – A typeface for creating sparklines in text without code
21 comments
·April 2, 2025cjs_ac
tiffanyh
Very cool, but …
I don’t understand how the ligature knows to generate a Vertical Bar vs Bar vs Pie Chart since there no identifier to specific which to use.
https://typographica.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/ff-chart...
kbhomes
If I'm understanding the article right, they're actually different fonts as opposed to a single font.
helpfulContrib
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schobi
Seems like a spark or sparkline describes a bar graph, rendered inline in regular text. There is some font magic to render {30,60} as small bars in the text.
Nice, but the terms were new to me. Would have helped to explain them first.
xnorswap
Sparklines are not bar graphs, they're lines, hence the name. If you have a copy of Tufte*, you can find them on page 171.
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.
mechanicum
> This tool doesn't really create sparklines, but it does create small charts
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.
TomasEkeli
Thankyou! I was starting to question myself looking at those small bar-graphs. That's not a spark-line!
Cool, I guess, but no spark-line.
esperent
> hence the name
That explains the "lines" part, but whence the "sparks"?
packetslave
Sparklines have been around (in modern usage) for nearly 20 years (coined by Edward Tufte in 2006.
Also, Google is a thing.
cromulent
Previously:
o1o1o1
While I like the idea of using it in a graphics application, I have to say that I do not see the advantage of using it in a web application instead of a simple CSS solution.
Can someone enlighten me as to what advantage a font solution would have for displaying bar charts?
Etheryte
For one, it remains readable for users using accessibility devices. You can do the same for the simple CSS solution, but based on experience, nearly no one does. Accessibility should be mandatory, but unfortunately it's often at best an afterthought.
helpfulContrib
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zeristor
It would be handy if this could work in markdown, but there’s no standard, I imagine it’s possible somehow dependent on the markdown parser.
kazinator
[flagged]
renerick
That's ridiculous, by this measure font ligatures are also contributing to fraud. Or, heck, even fonts themselves, who stops a font from displaying A as B?
worthless-trash
A secret division, crime fighters, working hard to keep fonts safe from misinformation, they work behind the screen, tirelessly, without thanks. We call them:
The typeface police.
mtillman
[flagged]
There has also been a commercial offering in this space for a while: FF Chartwell (https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/)