Re: Sparklines to be in ConTeXt?

[Brooks Moses <bmoses@stanford.edu>]

At 01:47 PM 7/31/2005, Tobias Wolf wrote:
>Hey,
>what do you people actually think about E. Tufte's Sparklines?
>They are a great and innovative thing in my mind; both in the
>information mediating and the typographic sense.
>There's a bare-bones LaTeX package on CTAN, but when I think about it,
>this technique could find a perfect place in ConTeXt's framework (say
>MetaPost, XML, Scripting and so on. There's even some kind of Ruby
>implementation).

(For those who haven't heard of the idea, it's basically a word-sized 
graphic that would go in a table or sentence, and provides an at-a-glance 
sense of the "meaning" of the data.  For instance, on a table of stock 
values, one could include mini-graphs of the last month's prices for each, 
allowing one to immediately see which stocks were having big changes, or 
whether a particular stock's change was meaningful, or such.  Read the 
links below for more details.)

In my opinion, they seem like a useful idea for some things, though I think 
there's a temptation to try to pack too much information into one.  There 
was quite an interesting pair of threads on Tufte's forums about them, here:

  http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001Eb
  http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR

The particular temptation that I saw was that they _aren't_ a substitute 
for a full graph -- they're only a substitute for the information one gets 
at the first glance at a graph.  In the thread, it seemed that some people 
were trying to put so much information in them that one would need to spend 
time studying them to read them, and that misses the point.

Personally, I haven't yet written anything that seemed to provide a good 
use for them, so I'm sort of waiting to have a real opinion on them until I 
actually find a place to give them a proper try-out in a "real-world" 
situation.

In any case, I do agree that MetaPost is probably one of the best ways to 
implement them, and ConTeXt's MetaPost integration should make it quite 
easy to organize such implementations.

- Brooks