Minimalist library to generate SVG views of scientific data

by afc·Mar 23, 2026·47 points·4 comments

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AI Analysis

●MidCozyShip It

CSS-themed SVGs are nice, but matplotlib and plotly already own this space.

Strengths

•CSS-based theming enables native dark/light mode support without code changes.
•JSON configuration separates plot specs from generation logic cleanly.
•Dual interface: Python API and CLI for different workflow preferences.

Weaknesses

•Plotting library space is saturated with matplotlib, seaborn, plotly, altair.
•Zero stars, author admits it's a personal blog project with no roadmap.

Post 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. :-)