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. A PHP implementation may be found at SourceForge.

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. The package requires pdflatex; sparklines cannot appear in a dvi file. The sparklines package uses pgf, and does not work with pictex.