Sparks – A typeface for creating sparklines in text without code

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.<p>Nice, but the terms were new to me. Would have helped to explain them first.

Given that the OpenType font format is Turing-complete [0], I would challenge the “without code” claim. ;)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;litherum.blogspot.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;addition-font.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;litherum.blogspot.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;addition-font.html</a>

There has also been a commercial offering in this space for a while: FF Chartwell (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typographica.org&#x2F;typeface-reviews&#x2F;chartwell&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typographica.org&#x2F;typeface-reviews&#x2F;chartwell&#x2F;</a>)

Previously:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23093815">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23093815</a> (2020)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15223212">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15223212</a> (2017)

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.<p>Can someone enlighten me as to what advantage a font solution would have for displaying bar charts?

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.

I wonder what the accessibility implications are.

Why no demo image in GitHub readme?

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