melatonin_audio_sparklines

As a fan of Sparklines (and Tufte in general), I have to shout out to one of my favourite places that sparklines have been used - in sudara's Audio Sparkline library for the popular JUCE Audio processing framework: https://github.com/sudara/melatonin_audio_sparklines The reason this is such a nerd tickle, is that sudara even went as far as to teach lldb how to render arrays' using sparklines, meaning one can get a pretty useful clue about the contents of an audio buffer within the debugger: https://forum.juce.com/t/new-audio-sparklines-module/46606 This, to me, aligns very much with the "Tao" of sparklines - although of course I've modified my local copy to use unicode fonts, which is either heinous or fabulous, depending on how much coffee I've had before I have to hit up lldb for details about why my day is going to be good/bad... ;)

You found the Achilles' heel of the project! I don't mind the fonts being different sizes or not monospaced, but the fact that there's a difference in height in the font rendering between ⎺ and ‾ on different platforms is a bummer. I have a flag in the C++ implementation so they can still be rendered "correctly" in IDEs like Xcode [1]. I felt doomed to Unicode in this case because of the number of places I wanted them to show up (CLion lldb integration, GitHub actions output, terminal). I would have loved to actually render graphics! I actually never thought about how they would render on a blog article, I wouldn't generally wouldn't use them for blogging... 1. https://github.com/sudara/melatonin_audio_sparklines/blob/ma...

Nice! I became obsessed with rendering sparkline representations of chunks of audio for the same reason: to inspect failures when writing tests / refactoring. I wrote a JUCE module (C++) and integration with lldb to make it quick to inspect chunks of audio in the IDE: https://github.com/sudara/melatonin_audio_sparklines