FR: Support circle as well as rectangle packing

[Offbeatmammal]

is it possible to add capability of packing circles (rather than rectangles) into the parent rectangle maintaining relative size and clustered around either the center or an arbitrary point?

[kurkle]

Would it be circles in the last level only? Do you have an example image what it would look like?

[Offbeatmammal]

for my example a single level as attached where the circles scale as large as they can to fit in the bounding box, and rules can apply to control the colour/visibility of labels etc

[kurkle]

To me it looks like those circles could be much larger in that box? or is the bounding box not visible?

[kurkle]

Quick mock:

[Offbeatmammal]

sample above was from a Tableau visualisation (not 100% what we want but close in look) and yes, there's a non-visible border being used to constrain the circles to give the slightly more vertical orientation (perhaps options to assign preferences for vertical/horizontal layouts would allow more visually pleasing defaults for the clustering as a longer term goal)

[kurkle]

ok. it also looks like that example lays the circles from top to bottom, leaving the top left corner unused. If that smallest circle was placed there, those circles could be bigger.
anyway, an interesting concept.

[Offbeatmammal]

finally found a name for this - Packed Circle chart. There are a couple of d3.js samples but I'd prefer to stick with chart.js

[kurkle]

This is probably different enough to deserve its own package.

[Offbeatmammal]

in the linked FR at chartjs/Chart.js#11443 I've dropped some sample code that relies on the bubble chart ... problem is getting it to scale so the bubbles stay in the canvas, and the circles actually touch! not sure if there's any logic existing in treemap that combines with the sample algorithm could help make this a reality?