Data can be hard to grasp and visualising it can make comprehension faster. Sparklines (tiny charts in text, like this 0{0,10,60,20,40,100,50,70,80,30}30) are a useful tool, but creating them for the web has always required code and using them natively in Word documents was previously impossible.
Sparks makes it easy to combine text and visual data by removing the need for any technical know-how. It works by detecting formatting cues and transforming the appropriate text into a very small chart via the magic of OpenType. For instance, 123{30,60,90}456 becomes . Presto!
Sparks works in any app that can handle OpenType Contextual Alternates (e.g. Microsoft Word, any new-ish web broswer, Illustrator). The fonts and (way) more information can be found on Github.
- This page’s lead image redraws content from Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence using Sparks.