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tylervigenHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Two years ago I re-vamped my "Spurious Correlations" side project, which is mostly just a bunch of …

Two years ago I re-vamped my "Spurious Correlations" side project, which is mostly just a bunch of charts. However, I couldn't find a charting software I liked that would display clean, simple visuals with the constraints I wanted. (I had used pCharts and HighCharts in the past, but didn't like charting in Javascript or PHP.) I decided to "roll my own" and write Python scripts that outputted SVG markup. I was worried this would go about as well as every other "roll your own" project does, but was pleasantly surprised. It is surprisingly easy to output reliable, good-looking SVG graphics using Python. If you are making a chart, everything is just math. The infinite scalability is almost just a happy upside to the simplicity of creating the visualizations, which is annoying in raster format. It made me like SVG even more.

Original discussionAn SVG is all you need148 source comments · at import
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eruHN

It's a bit sad that Postscript never caught on as much as it could have. In an alternate timeline, it could have been the HTML (and SVG) we got in ours.

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leephillipsHN

Thanks for making that website. I used examples from it in the first day of my statistics course ("by the end of this course you won't make these kinds of mistakes").

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crabmusketHN

If anyone is looking for a clean JS charting framework, I highly recommend Observable Plot. It's from the creator of D3 and it's much easier than using raw D3. I've been using it outside the Observable platform for debug charts and notebooks, and I find its output crisp and its API very usable. It doesn't try to have all the bells and whistles, and I'm not even sure if it has animations. But for the kind of charts you see in papers and notebooks I think it covers a lot.

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immibisHN

> I was worried this would go about as well as every other "roll your own" project does We as an industry need to get rid of this fear of creating stuff.

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