[Editor’s note: Looks like my earlier post on Wordle helped Marc Atret implement tag clouds (word clouds) in InDesign.]
Republished from Indiscripts.
Word Art
Wordalizer is a word cloud builder for InDesign CS4. Try now the beta version of this experimental script —inpired by the magnificent Wordle web tool created by Jonathan Feinberg.
Shape customization: 300 shapes. Color customization: Unlimited. Font customization: 40. Discover Adobe Creative Cloud, get up to 65% discount and enjoy Adobe free for students on a 7-day free trial. Start using Creative Cloud today.
Indesign Word Count
I began to work on Wordalizer for InDesign in September 2008! Jonathan Feinberg had just launched its brilliant Wordle Java applet and I was highly impressed by the typographical perfection that Wordle could reach in word clouding. I was naively dreaming to operate the same way from the InDesign DOM! Too much confident in my scripting abilities, I still hadn’t realized how powerful the Feinberg’s core algorithm was, until I found this post on “Kelso’s Corner” blog. Feinberg says: “It’s not quite ‘simple bounding box,’ which wouldn’t permit words inside words, or nestling up to ascenders and descenders. It’s full glyph intersection testing, but with a sprinkle of CS applied to make it work at interactive speeds.”
Yes indeed! The hardest part of the whole challenge is in speeding up hit-tests, and you can’t imagine what this Java performance problem looks like when translated into the InDesign JS context! After remaining at a standstill for a long time, I decided to start my script from the beginning again.
Tags: hit test, ibm, indesign, indiscripts, jonathan feinberg, jsx, marc atret, script, self reference, tag cloud, word cloud, wordalizer, wordle