Small Improvements in January and February 2019

Alright, alright. In October I promised to write a monthly series about small improvements in Datawrapper. What can I say, time flies, and a lot has happened at Datawrapper during that time (most notably, Fabian and Simon joined our team!).

But postponed is not abandoned, so here’s what happened after we launched the new pie and donut charts in December.

Dot plot & bar charts mouseover highlighting

Our dot plots and bar charts now have interactive highlighting (hover) of chart items. Optionally the values for each dot and bar can now be displayed on hover.

In grouped column charts we added an option to position value labels above columns as well as an option to color labels according to the colors used in the chart.

Pie & donut charts

In pie charts we added the ability to highlight slices in pie charts on mobile by tapping color key stops. We improved rendering of numbered labels in slices, added an option to disable color key in multiple pies and donuts, and made it possible to customize the text inside a single donut chart:

Locator maps

Of course, no month goes by without improvements to our locator maps. Markers can now be rotated even if they have symbols (symbols aren’t rotated). This is useful for squeezing labels into tight space.

Scatterplots

Our scatterplot axes got a major overhaul: custom axis ticks now can’t overlap anymore (grid lines remain in place though), and all custom axis ticks will show up (including the ones outside the default range)

Chart rendering and embedding

When loading custom fonts, charts will now render again after the fonts have been loaded. This ensures that text on the edge of the charts won’t get cut off anymore when font loading took too long.

Also, Datawrapper chart embed iframes now include title and aria-describedby attributes to comply with current EU web accessibility requirements.

New and updated basemaps

Last but not least, there also have been a lot of improvements to our basemap collection:

• For 🇨🇭 Switzerland we updated 2019 municipalities maps for the Cantons Aargau, Bern, Grisons, Jura and Zürich; added districts for Winterthur, and ZIP code maps for the entire country.
• For 🇫🇷 France and the 🇳🇱 Netherlands we updated 2019 municipalities maps for all regions.
• We also added new municipalities maps for Liechtenstein, Vancouver, Canada, and 🇪🇪 Estonia.
• Added Powiats for 🇵🇱 Poland.
• For 🇷🇺 St. Petersburg, Russia we added Districts and Okrugs.
• Added updated (2019) ZIP Codes for 🇩🇪 Germany.
• Added Localities for 🇦🇺 Victoria, Australia.

For more updates make sure to check out our changelog.