My friend Erik sent me some biostatistical data 
that he has been tracking over past few weeks. I decided to see what it would look like as a sparkline. There are a bunch of libraries and web services to generate these things, and I tried to find the simplest one implemented in Python. I found Matthew Perry’s module, installed PIL, and I was good to go. (I made a slight change to spark.py to expose the background color of the image as a parameter so the graphic would match my current theme.)
More data to visualize: I’ve been recording my gas mileage information 
since November, 2006. We can also note that gas prices 
have been steadily climbing since then (low: $2.10, high: $4.26). The simplicity and attractiveness of these graphics make them particularly compelling. I can think of a few places where using sparklines would be useful…
4 Comments
It might be neat to anti-alias and match the image height to the line heights. It seems like one of the nice things with sparklines is that they are non-abrasive and don’t demand more attention than they deserve.
Good suggestion. I’d have to dig into PIL to see if it’s possible to do some anti-aliasing. Is there a way to correlate line height with number of pixels (i.e., how do I calculate how tall to make the graphic so it matches the line height?)
Well, it looks like the line-height is 1.75em and the font-size 11px, so the line-height is 19.25px. You could make the height for the image 19px. You will also have to adjust the vertical-align of the image to bottom. I am not too crazy with the images dipping below the base line, but i think it might be better than having uneven line heights.
Nice, thanks. I made the adjustment. You are the web-wizard.
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