Talk:Sparkline in unicode

Bar choices

Hi Tim. There is a problem with your choices of bars in that they have a ragged bottom line:

▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█

There is a problem with my choice of bars in that the highest bar is not full width:

▁▂▃▅▆▇▉▇▆▅▃▂▁

I find the ragged baseline to be much more irritating. How to resolve? --Paddy3118 (talk) 03:18, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Oh, my font is Courier. --Paddy3118 (talk) 03:42, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I find that there's quite wide differences in the quality of fonts when it comes to blocks and box elements; a lot of fonts simply don't have the things that should extend to the limits of the glyph box they declare actually doing so at all. In my limited experimenting, Courier New is considerably better than the others I've tried (Andale Mono, Consolas, Courier, Monaco) for this sort of thing. Not much we can do about that really (except “blame the font makers”, which isn't very helpful). –Donal Fellows (talk) 11:24, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

I now find that there is raggedness in the baseline of my bar choice if I swap to Consolas font. I think I'll revert to using Tims seven bars and search for a font as the Unicode page has nothing to say on this, just:

@@	2580	Block Elements	259F
@		Block elements
2580	UPPER HALF BLOCK
2581	LOWER ONE EIGHTH BLOCK
2582	LOWER ONE QUARTER BLOCK
2583	LOWER THREE EIGHTHS BLOCK
2584	LOWER HALF BLOCK
2585	LOWER FIVE EIGHTHS BLOCK
2586	LOWER THREE QUARTERS BLOCK
2587	LOWER SEVEN EIGHTHS BLOCK

--Paddy3118 (talk) 03:56, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

The baseline is fine in my terminal font, and the baseline problem only manifests in the browser. In any case, if the font is problematic, that's the font's problem, not our problem. Notionally the blocks should have the same baseline, and I'd much rather have a solution that will be correct after they fix the fonts. (Or fix the font aliasing algorithm, which may be what's really going on here.) --TimToady (talk) 07:57, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it's the font dealiasing that is doing it. Changing the page's font size up and down moves the fuzz from the bottom to the top, and to different characters. So trying to pick the "right" characters is an exercise in futility, because what's right for you will be wrong for someone else. So just use the eight characters that are supposed to be right, and ignore the baseline issue. --TimToady (talk) 08:02, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Oh, you already did, nevermind. :) --TimToady (talk) 08:10, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Python query

In the (original) Python entry, obviously some kind of to be or not to be unicode thing, can someone explain the try/except on bar, ta? --Pete Lomax (talk)