Sparklines-ps is a Photoshop script to draw Sparklines, written in JavaScript for PC and Mac Photoshop CS and newer.
A sparkline is a small line graph designed to be used in-line within text to illustrate a time series; the concept was developed by data presentation guru Edward Tufte.
The idea is to show, using minimal space, how a value varies over time. One advantage of sparklines’ compactness is that several can be used together to allow at-a-glance comparison between a set of time series. At Tufte’s web site there is a longer description of sparklines, with further examples, from a sample chapter of Tufte’s book, Beautiful Evidence.
Sparklines were hard to produce when this script was first written, though support has improved as Sparklines have become mainstream -- e.g. Excel now has a Sparkline plotting capability. Most graphing packages are designed to produce large graphs or charts, and it can be very hard to generate the wide-but-thin lines for incorporation in documents. This was the motivation for writing a Photoshop script that would automate the production of sparklines. It works by reading a data series from a text file and plotting a sparkline image as a Photoshop path, and then stroking it with the pencil tool. This produces a bitmap image which can then be cut-and-pasted into the target document. The user retains control of the color and line style of the sparkline by setting the Photoshop foreground color and pencil tool settings before running the script.
Sparkline-ps is open source and licensed under the GNU GPLv3. That means it is free to use without royalty or fee, and may not be incorporated into a commercial product, and all derivative works are also covered by GPLv3. For more information on GPLv3, see the Free Software Foundation website: (http://gplv3.fsf.org/)
The full licensng text is in COPYING.md
The code will run on Mac or PC Photoshop CS or later; it does not work on any earlier versions.
The script works on textual data files, where the first line is the name of the quantity being charted, and the remainder of the lines are the data values. Using Microsoft Excel, it’s easy to create data files in this format: put the legend in cell A1, then the data values in cells A2, A3 and so on, and then do File->Save As… and select “Text file” for the output format.
To install the script, first locate Adobe Photoshop’s main directory on your computer. On my (Windows) computer, it’s in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop CS6
On the PC, save the script as Sparklinev2.js in the directory <Photoshop dir>Presets\Scripts
On the Mac, save the script as Sparklinev2.js in the directory <Photoshop dir>/Presets/Scripts
Start Photoshop (or re-start it, if it was already running). You should now see the Sparkline script on the File->Scripts menu.
First of all, select the foreground color and Pencil tool settings that you want to use for the Sparkline. To select a foreground color, double click on the foreground color swatch in the palette menu. To select the pencil tool, right-click (Mac: option-click) on the palette menu.
Then, set the pencil defaults to whatever you’d prefer using the tool menu just below the Photoshop menu bar.
Click File->Scripts->Sparkline to start the script. You will be promoted to locate the file containing the sparkline data.
Click “Open”; the script will open the file and then prompt you for the height of the sparkline, in pixels. The default height is 50 pixels, which is 50 points (0.7″) high on a typical 72dpi computer screen, and 12 points high when printed on paper at 300dpi (you can change the default height by editing the script).
The script will then ask if you want to automatically scale the sparkline to the document height. If you select Yes, then the script uses the minimum and maximum values present in the data file to scale the Y axis such that the minimum value is plotted at the bottom of the document, and the maximum value is plotted at the top.
If you select No, then the script will prompt you for the Y intercept (the data value that will be plotted at the bottom of the document) and the maximum Y value (which will be plotted at the top of the document).
Finally, the script asks for the X axis pixel spacing between points. The default setting of 1 plots each point of the sparkline immediately adjacent (one pixel away) from the previous point. To make the sparkline shorter, use a value less than 1. To make it longer, use a value greater than one.
Because the script creates a regular Photoshop document complete with history, you can use the Photoshop history palette to “go back in time” and change the way that the path is stroked. For example, to use a Brush stroke rather than a Pencil stroke, you’d go back in the document history to the point where the path has been saved, but before it has been stroked. Then stroke it with the Brush, rather than the Pencil.