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An SVG is all you need

(jon.recoil.org)
281 points sadiq | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.429s | source
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tylervigen ◴[] No.46240126[source]
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.

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1. leephillips ◴[] No.46240416[source]
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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2. tylervigen ◴[] No.46243946[source]
Glad to hear it! The use in stats courses is the main reason I keep it alive.