ABSTRACT
There are many typographical attributes suitable for encoding ordered data, such as font weight, oblique angle, width, underline style, and so on. Thematic maps, such as choropleth maps and cartograms, visualize ordered data typically using color and/or variation in sizes of geographic locations. However, there are many issues with these maps, such as some regions being too small to be discernable, large regions being more prominent, remote regions being removed, moved, or rescaled. Instead, typographic thematic maps can encode data into typographic attributes of labels, with label positions adjusted so that all labels are legible. The approach can extend to encode multi-variate data, long labels, thousands of labels, paragraphs, or manipulation of individual characters in strings. A typographic thematic map can outperform a choropleth map for location and identification tasks.
