Minimalist library to generate SVG views of scientific data
Details
- External ID
- 47492871
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Minimalist library to generate SVG views of scientific data
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- March 23, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 47
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8333333333333334
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Just wanted to share with HN a simple/minimal open source Python library that generates SVG files visualizing two dimensional data and distributions, in case others find it useful or interesting.I wrote it as a fun project, mostly because I found that the standard libraries in Python generated unnecessarily large SVG files. One nice property is that I can configure the visuals through CSS, which allows me to support dark/light mode browser settings. The graphs are specified as JSON files (the repository includes a few examples).It supports scatterplots, line plots, histograms, and box plots, and I collected examples here: https://github.com/alefore/mini_svg/blob/main/examples/READM...I did this mostly for the graphs in an article in my blog (https://alejo.ch/3jj).Would love to hear opinions. :-)
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche developer utilities and toolchains
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- svg visualization library for scientific data
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes A lightweight Python library that takes numerical coordinates and computes 2D SVG strings (paths, rectangles, axes) is a self-contained math and string-formatting task easily handled with AI assistance.
Discussion
4 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: gnuplot, Claude Code / Codex for chart generation, eb_bars (Rust barplot library)
Concerns raised: Data-dependent interactions (tooltips, clickable links) unreliable on mobile, Limited to ~80% reliability for additional Javascript interactions on desktop
Feature requests: Easy-to-install skills for AI agents, Better support for agent-driven workflows
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 155 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #35 of 156 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 140 days after the earliest competitor.
- SVG2CSS · ph · 2026-09-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Rust/WASM lighting data toolkit · hn · 2025-12-21 · 52 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Extract diagrams from PDF to SVG · hn · 2025-12-22 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- SimpleSVGs · hn · 2026-01-29 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- I built a declarative layout engine for SVG, Canvas, WebGL · hn · 2026-07-03 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- svg4.ru · ph · 2026-09-25 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- pic2svg · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- An SVG Inspection Tool · hn · 2026-01-01 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.48
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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