Tracking issue: Potential improvements enabled by data types in Grapher

[sophiamersmann]

Background

Once #3362 and #3375 land, the following data types will be known to Grapher:

• Numeric
• Integer
• String
• Ordinal (subclass of String)
• NumberOrString (essentially a mixed type)

Opportunities

• Use ordinal data to sort map legends and scatter plot legends
  • Issue: https://github.com/owid/owid-grapher/issues/1690
  • Related: https://github.com/owid/owid-grapher/issues/2710
• Use type information to choose better colour palettes (e.g. for ordinal variables)
• Data table: treat columns with categorical data differently than numerical columns
  • https://github.com/owid/owid-grapher/pull/3094
  • https://github.com/owid/owid-grapher/issues/3044
• Improve map sparklines for string data, see https://github.com/owid/owid-grapher/issues/1323
• ... probably more (please feel free to add to this list)