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But then again, you could just not use d3 in the first place and write a thin translation from your data structures to svg strings. Maybe use a template engine. You don’t need to cover the whole spec for your use case.

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SVG seems really intimidating at first, but for simple (especially non-work) use cases where you only need to do one thing, it's actually really fast and easy to generate minimal SVG directly from data. The learning curve is no steeper than learning a does-everything plotting library, again for simple unchanging usecases.

Prerequisites: knowing how to scale numbers from one range (data range) to another (SVG coordinate range) using multiplication and addition.

Yes, I ended up not using d3 and using something else instead. But it's a shame because I thought d3 is a great project and a good fit for my use case. I just didn't want to waste my time and energy dealing with Observable.

What did you use and was it up to the task?

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