Expand description
SeriesPattern — the non-colour channel that identifies a chart series.
A chart that tells its series apart by colour and nothing else fails WCAG 1.4.1 (Use of Color), whatever palette it uses. A CVD-safe palette like Okabe–Ito answers a different question — whether the colours are distinguishable from one another — and does not answer this one: a reader with monochrome vision, a monochrome printout, a display in bright sun, or a forced-colours setting has no colour channel at all. It also does not answer the wrap-around problem, where a ninth series repeats the first’s colour exactly.
So every series carries a second, orthogonal identity: a pattern. One value drives all three renderings a chart needs, so a series looks like itself whether it is drawn as a line, a bar, a slice, or a legend swatch:
| line | marker | filled area | |
|---|---|---|---|
Solid | solid | circle | plain |
Dashed | long dash | square | 45° hatch |
Dotted | dotted | triangle | back-hatch |
DashDot | dash-dot | diamond | cross-hatch |
ShortDash | short dash | cross | horizontal |
WideDash | wide dash | plus | vertical |
Six patterns against the theme palette’s eight colours means the pair
(colour, pattern) does not repeat until the 24th series — where colour
alone repeated at the 9th.
A series with no explicit pattern is assigned one from its position by
SeriesPattern::for_index, so the channel exists without any application
code. Whether a chart draws it is the chart’s decision (the stock charts
draw it once more than one series is visible, since a single-series chart
has nothing to disambiguate).
Enums§
- Series
Hatch - How a filled region (a bar, an area, a pie slice) carries its series’
pattern.
Noneis a plain fill; the rest are line hatches at the named angle, drawn in a contrasting tone over the fill. - Series
Marker - The marker glyph drawn at a line chart’s data points, and next to a series in a legend. Shape, not colour — that is the whole point.
- Series
Pattern - The non-colour visual channel identifying one chart series.