Overview

These are some internal tools to make working with third parties easier. These tools are not secret, but they are not intended for use outside Figure.NZ. No external support is offered for these tools.

Export charts for media

You will need

• One or more charts to export
• Spork, an internal Figure.NZ application
• The Founders Grotesk type family installed

Process

1. Go to a chart detail page, eg. international migrant arrivals.

2. Run Spork.

3. Drag the URL of the chart from the address bar in your browser and drop it onto the Spork window. The drag may require some practice: try to make the drag action the first thing you do when you switch to your browser, and try not to click or edit the address bar contents.
   Spork will run for a few seconds. A successful chart export will place two versions of the chart on your desktop, in PNG and SVG formats.
   If Spork reports an error, check that the URL is actually a chart detail page. If the error persists, copy the error text from the Spork window and send it to the Development team.

4. Open the PNG version and check that the chart layout is correct. Sometimes text in the legend or titles can be truncated or obscured. If this happens, ask the Data team to adjust the chart layout, and then repeat the export process.

Charts for Stuff

The PNG version can be used as-is by most media outlets, including Fairfax (Stuff). Send it via email or Google Drive. Don’t use social media platforms to send chart images to media outlets because this reduces the quality.

Charts for Radio NZ

Radio NZ uses the SVG version, but more processing is required:

1. Perform the export above as usual.

2. Open the SVG version in a vector editing tool (eg. Affinity, Inkscape, Illustrator, Sketch), convert the text to paths, and then export back to SVG. This removes the dependency on our in-house typefaces, so the chart will display correctly on other sites. Affinity Designer is very strongly recommended here.

Radio NZ have a lot of staff and your contact may not be aware that their systems can use SVG files. Radio NZ have prepared a guide for their staff which you can share with them if necessary.

SVG versions of our charts look much better and we’d like everyone to use them where possible, but most media outlets can’t publish them for technical reasons.

Patch charts for Twitter

By default, Twitter will compress any uploaded image as a lossy JPEG, even if that image is already compressed. This makes charts fuzzy and hard to read.

This tool adds an invisible glitch to a chart image which tricks Twitter into posting the original chart without modification.

Twitter Image Patcher

Save the chart from the detail page, then drag and drop it onto the tool. Use the image it creates for any charts that are posted on Twitter.