
Automating XKCD-Style Narrative Charts - r0muald
https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/automating-xkcd-style-narrative-charts/
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imkevinxu
Shameless plug for my XKCD Graph generator
[http://xkcdgraphs.com/](http://xkcdgraphs.com/)

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drzax
That's neat! Thanks for pointing it out.

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jamessb
>Like all good developers, rather than attempt to build it myself, I had a
good look around to see if anyone else had attempted the same thing, and it
turns out, someone had. Unfortunately, the example I found isn’t open source,
so we had to build it ourselves.

I came across an open source (MIT licensed) project to draw these kind of
charts a few years ago:
[https://github.com/bhagany/nchart](https://github.com/bhagany/nchart)

(The algorithms used by nchart and d3-layout-narrative are not the same)

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drzax
I remember seeing this (or something like it) around the time I embarked on my
project. Unfortunately, I needed a JS solution.

Another that has be pointed out to me since talking more about my project is
[http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~tanahashi/storylines/](http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~tanahashi/storylines/)

It's written in Python and looks like it produces really nice output, but I
haven't had time to look at it in detail yet.

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hitekker
Direct link to library:

[https://github.com/abcnews/d3-layout-
narrative](https://github.com/abcnews/d3-layout-narrative).

Neat stuff: I will see if it has utility for planning out my own writing.

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yegle
A narrative of
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies)
would be interesting.

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fizixer
Also, JakeVDP did xkcd-style plots [0] in 2012 (and I think now they're
bundled as part of the IPython/Jupyter/Matplotlib/Anaconda package).

[0] [https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-
plots-i...](https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-plots-in-
matplotlib/)

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zellyn
This seems like a perfect use case for human-aided layout: if you could drag
things to rearrange, but the computer kept it correct, it seems like you could
tweak them pretty quickly into a much better state.

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chris_wot
Damn, that example narrative chart is the who's who of either corrupt, or
stupid, Australian politicians.

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pronoiac
Here's a take on the problem from 2010:
[http://ogievetsky.com/PlotWeaver/](http://ogievetsky.com/PlotWeaver/)
(Warning: Flash)

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swinghu
Excellent，good work

