From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.comp.tex.context/21734 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Brooks Moses Newsgroups: gmane.comp.tex.context Subject: Re: Sparklines to be in ConTeXt? Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 14:11:01 -0700 Message-ID: <4.3.1.2.20050731135018.0251eee0@cits1.stanford.edu> References: Reply-To: mailing list for ConTeXt users NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1122844330 15382 80.91.229.2 (31 Jul 2005 21:12:10 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 21:12:10 +0000 (UTC) Original-X-From: ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl Sun Jul 31 23:12:04 2005 Return-path: Original-Received: from ronja.vet.uu.nl ([131.211.172.88] helo=ronja.ntg.nl) by ciao.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1DzL5u-0004s1-KB for gctc-ntg-context-518@m.gmane.org; Sun, 31 Jul 2005 23:11:38 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4E83E127B1; Sun, 31 Jul 2005 23:11:38 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from ronja.ntg.nl ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (smtp.ntg.nl [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id 08001-01-3; Sun, 31 Jul 2005 23:11:34 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from ronja.vet.uu.nl (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id 806C3127B9; Sun, 31 Jul 2005 23:11:34 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from localhost (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id C7AA4127B9 for ; Sun, 31 Jul 2005 23:11:32 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from ronja.ntg.nl ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (smtp.ntg.nl [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id 08001-01-2 for ; Sun, 31 Jul 2005 23:11:31 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from smtp2.Stanford.EDU (smtp2.Stanford.EDU [171.67.16.125]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7E0E3127B7 for ; Sun, 31 Jul 2005 23:11:31 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from mindolluin.stanford.edu (DNab42a657.Stanford.EDU [171.66.166.87]) by smtp2.Stanford.EDU (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id j6VLBPG0031861 for ; Sun, 31 Jul 2005 14:11:26 -0700 X-Sender: brooks@cits1.stanford.edu X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3.1 Original-To: Mailing list for ConTeXt users In-Reply-To: X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at ntg.nl X-BeenThere: ntg-context@ntg.nl X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: mailing list for ConTeXt users List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl Errors-To: ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.3 (2005-04-27) on smtp.ntg.nl X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at ntg.nl Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.comp.tex.context:21734 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.context:21734 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