The history of smallCharts

The first version of smallCharts was developed by Christian Haider in 2000 at the request of Telebörse, whose trademark was the display of countless charts. Subsequently, the newspaper was able to produce thousands of charts automatically using smallCharts. In particular, the smoothing of the chart lines, previously a tedious manual procedure, was automated.

In 2002 when the newspaper Handelsblatt requested their own smallCharts version, the company Smalltalked Visuals GmbH was founded.

Based on the programming language Smalltalk, this company provides a reliable, sound environment for the continued development and maintenance of smallCharts as well as for further interesting projects pertaining to stock markets and charts.

Since then, smallCharts has been continuously enhanced and has been specially adapted to the needs of financial newspapers and magazines.

While the first versions used CSV files for the input of raw stock market data, adaptors to Bloomberg and other online data providers have since been developed.

In recent years, the graphical output was changed from EPS to PDF. The PDF framework has been developed from the ground up and made available to the Smalltalk community as open-source software (PDF4Smalltalk).

Numerous European publications have been using their tailor-made versions of smallCharts for the automatic production of chart graphics. With continuing success and stability.