PiCCL: Data-Driven Composition of Bespoke Pictorial Charts

We present PiCCL (Pictorial Chart Composition Language), a new language that enables users to easily create pictorial charts using a set of simple operators. To support systematic construction while addressing the main challenge of expressive pictorial chart authoring-manual composition and fine-tuning of visual properties-PiCCL introduces a parametric representation that integrates data-driven chart generation with graphical composition. It also employs a lazy data-binding mechanism that automatically synthesizes charts. PiCCL is grounded in a comprehensive analysis of real-world pictorial chart examples. We describe PiCCL's design and its implementation as piccl.js, a JavaScript-based library. To evaluate PiCCL, we showcase a gallery that demonstrates its expressiveness and report findings from a user study assessing the usability of piccl.js. We conclude with a discussion of PiCCL's limitations and potential, as well as future research directions.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

• Publication date

  2025-11-21

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1109/TVCG.2025.3634264PMID 41269809
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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