Ren Donghao, Lee Bongshin, Brehmer Matthew
IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2018 Aug 20. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2018.2865158.
We present Charticulator, an interactive authoring tool that enables the creation of bespoke and reusable chart layouts. Charticulator is our response to most existing chart construction interfaces that require authors to choose from predefined chart layouts, thereby precluding the construction of novel charts. In contrast, Charticulator transforms a chart specification into mathematical layout constraints and automatically computes a set of layout attributes using a constraint-solving algorithm to realize the chart. It allows for the articulation of compound marks or glyphs as well as links between these glyphs, all without requiring any coding or knowledge of constraint satisfaction. Furthermore, thanks to the constraint-based layout approach, Charticulator can export chart designs into reusable templates that can be imported into other visualization tools. In addition to describing Charticulator's conceptual framework and design, we present three forms of evaluation: a gallery to illustrate its expressiveness, a user study to verify its usability, and a click-count comparison between Charticulator and three existing tools. Finally, we discuss the limitations and potentials of Charticulator as well as directions for future research. Charticulator is available with its source code at https://charticulator.com.
我们展示了Charticulator，这是一种交互式创作工具，可用于创建定制的、可重复使用的图表布局。Charticulator是我们对大多数现有图表构建界面的回应，这些界面要求作者从预定义的图表布局中进行选择，从而排除了构建新颖图表的可能性。相比之下，Charticulator将图表规范转换为数学布局约束，并使用约束求解算法自动计算一组布局属性以实现图表。它允许清晰表达复合标记或字形以及这些字形之间的链接，而无需任何编码或约束满足方面的知识。此外，由于基于约束的布局方法，Charticulator可以将图表设计导出为可重复使用的模板，这些模板可以导入到其他可视化工具中。除了描述Charticulator的概念框架和设计之外，我们还展示了三种评估形式：一个展示其表现力的图库、一项验证其可用性的用户研究，以及Charticulator与三个现有工具之间的点击次数比较。最后，我们讨论了Charticulator的局限性和潜力以及未来研究的方向。Charticulator及其源代码可在https://charticulator.com上获取。
