SankeyMATIC News

17 April 2022

New Feature: Control your diagram's Spacing with a slider!

In the past, you could type a number to set the spacing between each Node in a column, but:

Getting the spacing just right involved a lot of trial and error.
If you changed your diagram’s height or margins, the spacing value was not adjusted accordingly.

Now, you have a 'Spacing' slider which gives you an easy way to try out many different spacing approaches without needing to guess at a specific number.

And as a bonus, the look of your diagram will be preserved even when you change the height or margins.

Animation showing the SankeyMATIC interface with the new Spacing slider. Sliding the thumb to '0' removes all the space it can, making the flow diagram look more like a simple horizontal bar graph. Sliding the thumb to 'Max' makes the flows as thin as they can be (without making them disappear entirely). — Here is a short animation showing the feature in action:

One thing to keep in mind: The more spacing you add, the harder it becomes to accurately compare flow sizes, as you can see above.

Try it out! It’s actually pretty fun to experiment with.

(Honestly, it's one of my favorite features ever.)

More fixes

Color themes were not being applied to nodes when their names used non-Latin characters. This now works as expected. Thanks to @IvanaGyro for the bug report.

6 March 2022

New Feature: Better Color Selection Tools

Now, choosing a color theme for your Nodes is much more flexible and fun.

Screenshot showing the updated SankeyMATIC Nodes interface with the new section 'Default Node Colors' highlighted. This section presents radio buttons which select between 4 themes. Next to each theme's name is a display showing all of that theme's colors. On the left and right sides of the color groups are arrow buttons. These buttons control which color the theme begins with.

There are now four updated themes to choose from (up from 3). For more about these color schemes, visit the d3 color scales page.
Each theme's colors are visible at all times.
You can now rotate the colors within a theme so that SankeyMATIC will start assigning colors from any point in the list that you choose.

Click the "<" and ">" buttons for your selected theme to adjust the starting point.
Every color in every theme will reveal its color code when you hover over it.

This is handy if you want to adopt one specific color in your inputs.

Example:
Try it out!

Additional changes:

SankeyMATIC now uses version 7.3.0 of the d3.js library (a major upgrade from version 2.10.3)
Labels for selected radio buttons and checkboxes are now highlighted with color to make them easier to find.

Labels for un-selected radio buttons and checkboxes are now dark gray instead of black.

January 2022

New Feature: Straight Flows

Tiny example Sankey diagram showing flows which curve a little bit — Still a little curved...

Tiny example Sankey diagram showing flows which are completely flat — Totally flat!

SankeyMATIC has long had the ability to adjust the curvature of flows with a slider labeled Curviness.

However, it has not had the ability to remove all bends from the flows, since that actually requires a different drawing approach. (Straight or flat flows are really parallelograms, and no Bezier curve is going to produce that shape.)

That problem is now solved.

Setting the Curviness slider all the way to the left now produces truly straight flows.

New Feature: Extra Large image download format: 6x

Screenshot showing the SankeyMATIC Export PNG interface with the option '6x - XL' chosen

For people who want higher-resolution output, there is now a 6x PNG image export option.

Tip: Depending on your diagram size and on your device, generating 4x or 6x images may make your experience filled with long pauses.

To avoid this, set the export PNG image's Size to 1x or 2x while you are setting up your diagram so that you can iterate quickly.

Wait until you are truly ready to export before choosing 6x.

New SankeyMATIC Logo!

The new 'S' logo will be used:

on Twitter
on GitHub
as the little icon for this site in your web browser
and so on.

Better filenames for downloaded images

Downloaded PNG image files now have a date/time stamp in the name, like: sankeymatic_20220130_155723_600x400.png.

This makes it easy to sort the files by when you created them, which is often handy.
This also avoids annoying duplicated filenames - you won't see "sankeymatic_1200x1200-3.png", "sankeymatic_1200x1200-4.png", etc. any more.

Added "Made with SankeyMATIC" tag

When people post their SankeyMATIC diagrams to social media, it's very common for others to ask: "What did you use to make that?"

I've added a Made with SankeyMATIC tag to diagrams by default to help answer the question before people ask it.

For anyone who does not want the "Made with SankeyMATIC" tag, there is a simple nearby checkbox, plainly visible, to remove it.

Other minor changes

Various improvements to the SVG code which SankeyMATIC produces - better organized, better labeled, no unnecessary precision, etc.
Fixed a bug where unwanted trailing 0s could appear on values when the chosen Number Format used a ',' as the decimal point and 'Always show full precision' was unchecked.
Updated the JavaScript dependency Canvg to version 3.0.9 (from version 1.3).

December 2021

New Feature: Sliders now produce 'live' changes

Small screenshot showing the 'Curviness' slider from the SankeyMATIC Build page

Appearance controls which use sliders (examples: Curviness, Node Opacity, Flow Opacity, Border Width) now make immediate changes to the diagram as you drag them.

This makes it much easier to observe what each slider is doing and to precisely pick the value you want.

Added multiple sample diagrams

Thumbnail image of the sample Sankey diagram for a Job Search

Thumbnail image of the sample Sankey diagram for a Ranked Election

Thumbnail image of the sample Sankey diagram for a Basic Budget

Now there are 3 different diagrams you can use as starting points when you first begin.

Note: When you have made any changes to the Inputs field, choosing a new base diagram will alert you that you will lose your changes if you continue.

Other minor changes

In the Inputs section, comments are now indicated using two slashes ("//") instead of an apostrophe.
- The double slash is a standard comment marker for many languages and formats, so this will hopefully be more familiar to more people.
- Typing apostrophes on iOS devices defaulted to the 'smart' version, making it require several steps to successfully enter a comment. This change eliminates that difficulty.

November 2021

New Feature: Better user experience when a diagram does not add up

Screenshot of the old SankeyMATIC warning about node values not matching, starting with 'The Flow Cross-Checker found some imbalances'. — **Before:**

Screenshot of the new SankeyMATIC differences list. There is now a checkbox which controls whether you want to see the differences, and the list is organized in a table to be more easily read. — **After:**

Screenshot of the new SankeyMATIC display when the box to list differences is unchecked. No list of differences is shown. — When 'list the differences' is unchecked:

Previously:

SankeyMATIC treated any imbalance as an error and produced a prominent warning at the top of the page.
The list was not formatted in an easy-to-read fashion.
There was a way to turn off the check for balanced nodes, but that checkbox was buried in the Advanced settings panel and difficult to discover.

Now, SankeyMATIC will let you know that there are nodes with differences (not imbalances).

The notification is now below the diagram, not above. (It does not need to urgently grab your attention.)
The list of differences is now displayed in a more readable table.
The checkbox to stop listing differences is just above the list, making it much easier to find and use.

Earlier

(I hope to backfill more of the history here, but until then, the 'history' link below is another place to look.)

Detailed SankeyMATIC version history at GitHub