from Hacker News

Sparks – A typeface for creating sparklines in text without code

by OuterVale on 4/2/25, 6:44 AM with 28 comments

  • by schobi on 4/5/25, 6:19 AM

    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.

  • by layer8 on 4/5/25, 4:59 PM

    Given that the OpenType font format is Turing-complete [0], I would challenge the “without code” claim. ;)

    [0] https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html

  • by cjs_ac on 4/5/25, 11:31 AM

    There has also been a commercial offering in this space for a while: FF Chartwell (https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/)

  • by cromulent on 4/5/25, 9:48 AM

  • by o1o1o1 on 4/5/25, 7:36 AM

    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?

  • by zeristor on 4/5/25, 6:34 AM

    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.

  • by jszymborski on 4/5/25, 4:47 PM

    I wonder what the accessibility implications are.

  • by dvh on 4/5/25, 6:55 AM

    Why no demo image in GitHub readme?

  • by kazinator on 4/5/25, 6:54 AM

    [flagged]