The figure library

No figure on this site is a drawing that was made once and saved. Each one is a function: it takes parameters and returns SVG, so the same generator draws the merge sort's access trace and the heapsort's without either being redrawn, and both are drawn from a real run.

That is the reason the collection can keep growing without the illustrations drifting apart. A generator is written once, checked once, and every essay that calls it inherits the same line weights, the same colour roles, and the same behaviour in dark mode. There are 154 of them so far, called by 154 distinct names across 384 essays.

The number beside each family is the count of essays that call it, and it is the number this collection is really built on. A generator instantiated once is a drawing with extra steps; the target is a family used dozens of times, because nobody writes two thousand generators. Each family has a page of its own listing every essay that calls it — which is also the blast radius of changing it.

The library runs to 5 pages, and they are cut by weight rather than by count: each card carries its generator's actual output, and those run from about two kilobytes to about eighty. A cut at n cards a page would therefore make some pages forty times heavier than others for no reason a reader could see, so the cut is made at a fixed number of bytes and the card count is whatever fits.