Sparklines are intense, simple, wordlike graphics (so named by Edward Tufte). In lieu of a more detailed introduction, Professor Tufte's site has an early release of a chapter on sparklines, see www.edwardtufte.com. A PHP implementation can be found at http://sparkline.sourceforge.net/.

A sparkline can be added using the sparkline environment. Also, you can add sparkling rectangles for the median and special sparkling dots in red or blue. Only use sparklines with pdflatex, sparklines cannot appear in a dvi-file. The sparklines package uses pgf, and does not work with pictex. The author is Andreas Löffler.