As one small sign of moving towards minimalism, I decided not to make a hex sticker for the litedown package when I started writing it in 2024. To be precise, I didn’t want to make a sticker image (PNG or SVG). I did make sticker-like ASCII art for the package, which you can find in the README file. It may look ugly (especially on Windows), but it’s tiny: only 55 bytes in total. I didn’t need to use any image editing software, and it only took me a few minutes to make.
I used to like hex stickers, too, but as the number of stickers grows over the years, I’m kind of tired of them now (visual fatigue, aesthetic burnout, whatever you call it), and I’m happy to take one thing off my list when creating a new package.
When I saw Charlie Gao’s announcement of his secretbase package on Mastodon, I was amused to find that he also made an ASCII art “sticker” for his package. High five, Charlie! And congrats on your new package “smaller than most hex sticker PNGs”!
FWIW, if I remember correctly, Charlie was the first package author to use litedown for package vignettes (e.g., mirai and nanonext). If anyone else also prefers a small footprint for their package, litedown can significantly reduce the package size if the package has rmarkdown-based vignettes (the reduction will be particularly significant when a vignette doesn’t contain many images but is mostly plain text).
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