cardargus (Python)

Generate self-contained SVG information cards with embedded Google Fonts, shields.io-style badges, sparklines, icons and logos, from Python.

This is a port of the R package cardargus (site). Both implementations produce the same SVG structure, so cards look the same whichever language generated them.

Features

• svg_card(): a complete card with title, badge row, rows of labelled value boxes (greedy word wrapping), optional icons, footer and logos.
• 8 preset themes (card_themes()), customizable with card_theme(). Arguments you pass explicitly always win over the theme.
• Solid or CSS linear-gradient(...) backgrounds, turned into SVG gradients.
• create_sparkline(): line, area and bar mini-charts to use as field icons.
• create_badge(): shields.io-style badges with automatic dark/light text.
• Built-in icons: icon_house, icon_building, icon_construction, icon_map_pin, icon_money. Any SVG string or .svg file also works.
• Accessibility: every card has an SVG <title>, an optional <desc> (alt=), role="img" and aria-labelledby.
• save_svg(): writes a portable SVG with the fonts embedded as base64 WOFF2 @font-face. With subset_fonts=True the font is cut down locally (fontTools) to just the glyphs the card uses, about 3 KB instead of tens of KB.
• Text is measured with the real font metrics (fontTools), so wrapping and badge sizes match the R package.
• Small footprint: depends only on fonttools, brotli and platformdirs.

Installation

pip install cardargus

Requires Python 3.10 or newer.

Quickstart

from cardargus import create_sparkline, save_svg, svg_card

card = svg_card(
    "FAR",
    badges_data=[
        {"label": "UH", "value": "192"},
        {"label": "Recurso", "value": "36,4 milhões"},
    ],
    fields=[
        [{"label": "Empreendimento", "value": "CAIARA II", "with_icon": True}],
        [
            {"label": "Tendência", "value": "Alta",
             "with_icon": create_sparkline([2, 4, 3, 6, 5, 8], width=55, height=34)},
            {"label": "Município", "value": "Recife"},
        ],
    ],
    theme="ocean",
    alt="Card com indicadores do programa FAR",
    footer="Atualizado em 2026-10-25",
)

save_svg(card, "far.svg", subset_fonts=True)  # self-contained, fonts embedded

svg_card() returns the SVG as a string. You can write it straight into HTML or a notebook (IPython.display.SVG(card)), or save it with save_svg().

Fields and icons

fields is a list of rows, and each row is a list of dicts with label and value. Only the first field of a row can carry with_icon:

Logos (logos=, bottom_logos=) follow the same rules. Files must exist and have an <svg> root element. Any other string raises ValueError. Raw markup is embedded verbatim, so only pass markup you trust.

Fonts

The default font is Jost. On first use cardargus downloads the font from Google Fonts (WOFF2) into a user cache (font_cache_dir(), platformdirs.user_cache_dir("cardargus")). Text metrics and save_svg() both use that cache.

from cardargus import install_fonts, register_font

install_fonts(["Jost", "Roboto"])     # pre-download for offline use
register_font("MyFont-Regular.ttf")    # or bring your own file (family "MyFont")

Environment variables:

• CARDARGUS_CACHE_DIR: use another cache directory.
• CARDARGUS_OFFLINE=1: never touch the network.

If a font is neither cached nor downloadable, cardargus falls back to approximate metrics (each character about 0.55 em wide) and emits a single FontFallbackWarning. It never fails because of a missing font.

Themes

from cardargus import card_theme, svg_card

mine = card_theme("ocean", footer_color="#cceeff")
svg = svg_card("FAR", theme=mine, footer="nota", bg_color="#123456")  # bg_color wins

Theme components: bg_color, font, title_color, label_color, value_bg_color, value_text_color, value_border_color, footer_color.

To render the gallery (one card per theme, the same demo card as the R package's Theme Gallery vignette), run:

python examples/gallery.py   # writes examples/output/theme-*.svg

Utilities

from cardargus import compress_number, is_light_color

compress_number(36_400_000)   # '36,4 milhões'
compress_number(1500)         # '1,5 mil'
compress_number(None)         # 'S/I'
is_light_color("#fab255")     # True

Relationship to the R package

The Python package follows the R API (snake_case names, same defaults: width=500, padding=20, corner_radius=8, font="Jost", bg_color="#fab255", ...) and produces the same SVG elements in the same order, with the same class names (.card-title, .field-label, .field-value, .footer-text). Version 0.1.0 covers the SVG core only. The R package's PNG/PDF export, Chrome rendering and knitr/Quarto integration are not ported.

The known differences, mostly deliberate:

• Arguments after fields are keyword-only. The themable arguments default to None ("use the theme, or else the built-in default"), which replaces R's missing() check. show_viewer does not exist.
• with_icon also accepts .svg file paths (R accepts raw SVG only there).
• Colors and font names are validated. Invalid values raise ValueError instead of being written into the SVG as is.
• When resizing raw-SVG logos, only the root <svg> element is changed (R's gsub also rewrote attributes such as stroke-width inside the logo).
• Element ids are CRC32 hashes of the content plus a counter, like R, but the hex values differ, because R hashes serialized objects.
• Subsetting runs locally with fontTools, not through the Google Fonts &text= API.

Development

uv venv .venv && uv pip install -e ".[dev]" --python .venv/bin/python
.venv/bin/python -m pytest

The test suite never uses the network.

Authors

André Leite (maintainer), Marcos Wasiliew, Hugo Vasconcelos, Carlos Amorim, Diogo Bezerra, Júlia Nascimento Barreto. See CITATION.cff.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.