wtf is sterling?

Sterling is a React and MDX component library for building charts and figures inside data driven articles, blog posts, and documentation. It was built by La Matemaga as an editorial system so that every chart on a site can share the same visual language instead of each post reinventing titles, captions, colors, and export behavior from scratch. A single wrapper component called SterlingFigure holds that shared shell, title styling, captions, source labels, export buttons, and accessible chart labels, while separate chart primitives draw the actual data. The library ships a large set of chart types built on D3 and SVG, including bar charts, scatterplots, lines, histograms, boxplots, violin plots, heatmaps, correlation matrices, pie and donut charts, chord diagrams, Sankey diagrams, candlestick charts, radar charts, treemaps, network diagrams, dendrograms, and geographic maps, among others. It also includes a full color system with categorical, sequential, and diverging palettes, plus a helper for building Tailwind style color scales, though Tailwind itself is optional. Figures support English and Spanish interface text, image copying, PNG export, sharing where the browser supports it, and CSV export of the exact processed data behind a chart. The package requires React and React DOM version 18.2 or later, and depends on D3 modules and a few small helper libraries that install automatically. It is not yet published to npm, for now it can only be installed locally from a checkout of the repository. Once imported, you register the base styles once at your app's entry point, then either use ready made chart components directly in React or register them for use inside MDX files alongside your own data loading components. Sterling deliberately leaves out La Matemaga's own datasets, site pages, and specific visual examples. It positions itself purely as the reusable library layer that other data storytelling sites and blogs can build on top of, with editorial defaults like credit lines and title marks that any consuming project can override or remove.