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Archive for August, 2008

Word cloud program

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

I saw the Wordle site for making word clouds and was really impressed. I had a few ideas for doing things differently–showing phrases instead of individual words for example. So I wrote my own version.

Origin of the Species word cloud

It displays phrases, words, or combinations of words and phrases. Text size indicates the relative frequency of different words. The output is a PDF file.

Uplift word cloud

The algorithm used to arrange the words places them randomly on open spaces in the image. Horizontal and vertical placements alternate. There is a bias toward placements towards the center of the image. This helps keep the cloud together. Words difficult to place are shrunk up to 10%. The Postscript font metrics are used to find the exact size of each letter. The allows close word placement.

GEB

Here it is: freq_8-08.zip
System requirements: OS X or Linux.