What is tufte-claude-skill?

This repository is a skill plugin for Claude Code, the AI coding assistant tool from Anthropic. Once installed, it intercepts natural-language requests such as 'make me a chart' and generates charts that follow the data visualization principles of Edward Tufte, an American statistician known for rigorous work on how to present quantitative information clearly and honestly. The skill is distilled from three of Tufte's foundational books. 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' covers how to depict numbers with statistical integrity. 'Envisioning Information' covers how to organize information in space. 'Visual Explanations' covers how to show motion, causality, and narrative in visuals. Together these yield ten principles the skill applies when generating charts. The principles include: maximizing the fraction of ink on the chart that represents actual data versus decorative or structural overhead, removing chart elements that do not add information, such as frame boxes, minor gridlines, and redundant axis ticks, avoiding encoding a single quantity in multiple redundant visual formats at the same time, ensuring bar charts start at zero to preserve graphical integrity, and creating small-multiple layouts when a dataset has multiple cross-sections that should be compared on a consistent scale. A well-designed chart should communicate one clear shape from across the room and reveal individual data points when examined closely. Installation takes one command: clone the repository into a specific subfolder inside your Claude Code skills directory. The skill loads automatically the next time Claude Code starts. Typing /tufte or asking Claude to 'make a chart of anything' confirms it is working. No additional configuration is needed. The repository is written primarily as documentation and configuration for the skill. No license is stated in the README.