
Font that creates charts - gbvb
https://www.fontfont.com/how-to-use-ff-chartwell
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micheljansen
This is really quite genius. It uses ligatures (normally used to replace
multiple letters by a single, nicer glyph, such as fi fl ae etc.) to replace
"55+24+31" with a chart. You could theoretically use this on the web, and
people who use screen readers or text-based browsers can still see the data.
Cool!

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uncoder0
Why do people still insist on doing this? I prefer to remap all fonts to two
(a serif and a sans) that are much easier for me to read. When people use
these silly font+glyph combos I never use their software. The one rare
exception is GitHub. I still wish people would just use SVG.

Edit: Why was this down-voted? Is this not a legitimate concern? It is worth
mentioning that I remap my fonts to help my dyslexic brain keep track of the
baseline.

Edit2: It is also worth noting that this font does degrade quite gracefully
and my problem lies more with the paradigm than this particular font.

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sp332
"Insist"? Because it's fun, and useful. "When people use these silly
font+glyph combos I never use their software." That's fine. Don't.

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uncoder0
You are aware it breaks accessibility, right?

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ZoFreX
I'd argue it's one of the better options from an accessibility viewpoint -
from a screen reader perspective, you'll get the raw numbers. If the chart was
an image, you'd get nothing.

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uncoder0
That is a good point. This font does degrade gracefully.

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jsiarto
I love this set--we've been using them at Loudpixel for quite some time (even
before they were bought by FontFont). I use them primarily in Illustrator for
our custom research reports and publications:
<http://loudpixel.com/sugarfree/>

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seclorum
I'm also a fan .. so much so, that I'm mid-way integrating harfbuzz into MOAI
so that I can use Chartwell in games with ease and pleasure ..

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vessenes
What is the license like? It looked like per-user. Does this mean they do not
wish it to be embedded on a web page? Can web browsers parse these OTF
ligatures? Anybody have any experience here?

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tptacek
It would probably be a bad idea to embed this in a web page just for technical
reasons, but for avoidance of doubt: fonts that you have to buy licenses for
are virtually never embeddable directly. As a rule of thumb, if a technically
capable person could in a short amount of time recover the original font from
your web page and use it in their own work, you're materially violating the
font's license.

This isn't just how this graphing font works; it's how virtually all
professional typefaces work.

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stephencanon
This is a really cute hack.

That said, the pricing is absurd. There are numerous data analysis and
graphing programs that produce better looking, more customizable charts and
graphs with a simpler UI, most of which cost significantly less than $129
despite being much more powerful.

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sp332
It's not really about producing charts, it's about putting charts where you
normally couldn't. World primary energy use by %: Oil 34.77, Coal 29.36, NG
23.76, Nuke 5.47, Hydro 6.63 █▇▅▁▂

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jgamman
how did you do that?

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ThePherocity
That's how we used to make GUIs. Miss those days.

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sp332
Close :) That was <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437> (or the Unix
equivalent I guess). I used the Unicode symbols that roryokane mentioned
above, because it has more options for the height of a block (not just half-
blocks). You can get Unicode versions of the older drawing symbols from this
page
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Latin_character_sets_%2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Latin_character_sets_%28computing%29)

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duaneb
I thought this was really cool, until I saw that it cost $129....
Realistically, who would buy this? I'm assuming that because it is
proprietary, it can not be used on the Internet, and if you don't have to
cater to arbitrary OSes, why not use grh software?

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karlshea
$129 is actually very reasonable for a font. I've seen individual fonts
several times that and you could only use them in print.

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duaneb
I am a type nerd; I've bought my share of typefaces in my time. This offers no
discernable advantage over traditional chart generation. It only makes sense
as a web font, and even then, it's a hack. I just don't see it worth the
money.

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kmfrk
What software aside from Adobe products would allow me to use the font like
this?

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mikeklaas
TextEdit has great support for OpenType

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ta12121
Is there any particular reason the link is HTTPS, especially considering that
the page contains no sensitive content, and a warning about non-SSL content
when it's loaded?

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tptacek
Because it's on a site that accepts credit cards and has a prominent "Buy"
link on the page itself.

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ta12121
I guess that makes sense, but doesn't the mixed content warning make it moot?
Doesn't that mean unauthenticated javascript can be inserted?

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tptacek
They should fix that, yes.

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kondro
What an interesting idea. Surely this must take advantage of some in-font
scripting… if I remember correctly there is some type of ECMAScript variant
inside OpenType.

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snorkel
Cool idea, but should offer a free version to spread the adoption. The premium
version could offer more chart styles.

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roymabookie
FONTastic

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joering2
This is really nice! Any case studies, preferably HTML, where I can see this
in work? :)

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jsiarto
This isn't a web font and is mostly used in print (InDesign, Illustrator,
etc...). Not sure if it's even licensed for the web.

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davidcollantes
Something I do not understand. Is Photoshop/Illustrator needed for this?

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seclorum
The chart items are implemented in the font as ligatures, which are (in a
nutshell) elements that can be overlaid over other fonts in order to give them
special inflection/meaning .. instead of a carat or so on, the ligature
elements of the font file are filled with perfectly scaled graph figures, per
datum, so that you can address the values for the graph in ligature terms ..
+20+10+30+20, etc.

When you do that, and select Chartwell as the font, you get a working font -
in Illustrator, or any font-display program that supports setting the Text
style for .ttf fonts ..

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thegarside
This is rad!

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zenogaisis
I wish it was free :(

