tufte-tables-and-text-tableslisted

# Tables and Text-Tables: The Choice of Design ## Overview Tufte treats the table not as the graphic's poor relation but as one rung on a continuous ladder of display formats — sentence, text-table, table, semi-graphic, graphic — with the choice governed by the content, the extensiveness of the labels, and the volume and ordering of the data (p. 178). Two findings anchor the skill: tables usually beat graphics for small data sets of roughly twenty numbers or fewer (p. 56), and a single well-structured *supertable* can outperform whole fields of little charts (p. 179). Between the plain table and the full graphic sits a rich middle territory — semi-graphic tables that keep exact values and row/column addressability while borrowing position, slope, spacing, or glyphs from graphics (pp. 145, 158–159, 174, 180). This skill is the deep treatment of that territory. Siblings touch it in passing: **`tufte-data-density`** §12 states the supertable-beats-chart-litter claim as a density result; **`tufte-aesthetics-and-technique`** §6 compresses the format ladder into one selection table; **`tufte-multifunctioning-elements`** carries the general doctrine behind two of the hybrids here (data-as-grid, viewing architecture). Cross-reference them; the table-design grammar lives here. For the typography inside numeric columns, see **`tufte-typography-for-data`**. ## §1. The Format Ladder — Five Rungs (pp. 178–180) Tufte names three basic structures for showing data — sentence, table, grap