

A Visual Language For Finance Patterns - SaintSal
http://www.saintsal.com/2012/01/a-visual-language-for-finance/

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zeratul
SaintSal: It's a good start but apart of semantics (icons with meaning) you
also need a grammar to call it a language. In case of visual language it means
that there is a way of merging simple glyphs into more complicated icon. Here
is an article that describe how it can be done in medicine:

[http://www.sd.polyu.edu.hk/iasdr/proceeding/papers/Collabora...](http://www.sd.polyu.edu.hk/iasdr/proceeding/papers/Collaborative%20Design%20Research_%20The%20Visualization%20of%20Medical%20Concepts.pdf)

I'm looking for an open source project that I could use in my applications.
There is <http://thenounproject.com/> but it does not have grammar. The
merging of icons is done for you (e.g., the iron icon with one, two, or three
dots)

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SaintSal
Thanks, that's really helpful. I hadn't thought of grammar explicitly, mainly
because I was more focused on something like design patterns.

So far, the emergent grammar has been: equity and/or balance sheet, then an
event or a profit/loss, then back to equity and/or balance sheet.

I'd like to see what people try to do with this before insisting on a grammer,
so you're right, maybe calling it a visual language is overstating where
things are at the moment.

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ivan_ah
Very cool idea.

On a technical note, you could define three macros

    
    
       \equity{10}{90}
       % where the units are percentages,  and
       \balance{8}{10}
       \RandC{8}{10}
       % where the units are in mm
    

and use this level of abstraction in your source code. I suggest, the diagrams
in a separate column to support the narration, but with tikz you could even
put them inline.

These examples should get you started if you want to "program" your graphics:
<http://piratepad.net/GVsgD6x5D3>

Speaking of power tools for graphics, check out also
<http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/piscript/> and the there-associated book
<http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/graphics/manual/>

