WordCram.org

WordCram 0.4.1 is a minor bug-fix release, available in zip and tar.

Danilo Di Cuia wondered whether French accents worked in WordCram, which surprised me, because I’ve seen characters like that in WordCrams before. But as it turns out, it only worked if you pass your own array of Words: the word-counting part was removing all accented characters from the source text.

The bug’s fixed now, but for the 0.5 release, I’ll probably replace that whole part with cue.language instead. It’s a small library for natural-language tasks, written by Wordle creator Jonathan Feinberg, and it grew out of Wordle. It’s better-tested, and it handles a bunch of languages already. That part of WordCram was always pretty immature, so it’ll be nice to rely on something more battle-hardened.

WordCram 0.4 is ready for consumption! Download the zip or the tar.

The high notes:

• If you’re passing your own words, you can pre-set their color, font, size, angle, and placement: word.setColor(#f02939).setAngle(QUARTER_PI); These settings will override the WordColorer, WordAngler, etc. This should make it easier to control how specific words are drawn, but you can even use it for styling all your words.
• If you’re not seeing as many words as you expected, you can call getSkippedWords() to see which words were skipped, and call wasSkippedBecause() on each one to see why it was skipped. If you’re troubleshooting the words that do show up, you can call getRenderedSize(), getRenderedColor(), etc, on each word. And if you want to do some interaction, getWordAt(x,y) will tell you which word is at the given [x,y] coordinates.
• All the settings for fine-tuning a WordCram are now at your fingers. If your WordCram is too slow, too crowded, or too sparse, you can probably fix it: you can limit how many words WordCram will try to render, limit the size of the smallest word it’ll accept, and limit how many times it’ll try to place a word.
• A bunch of new tutorial sketches will walk you through WordCram in (I hope) a sensible order. They cover all the features, both new and old.

See the Release notes, the tutorial sketches, and the javadoc for the details. If you have any questions or feedback, or just want to show off your word clouds, I’m @wordcram on twitter, and wordcram-at-gmail.

WordCram 0.3 is here, and it has some nice improvements.

Simpler to Use

It’s easier to create a WordCram: instead of that long list of parameters, you instantiate it with your sketch, and then call methods on your WordCram to customize it.

From this:

new WordCram(this,
  new TextSplitter(StopWords.ENGLISH + " shall")
    .split(loadStrings(myFile)),
  Fonters.pickFrom(createFont("serif", 1)),
  Sizers.byWeight(100, 1200),
  Colorers.twoHuesRandomSats(this),
  Anglers.mostlyHoriz(),
  Placers.swirl())
.drawAll();

To this:

new WordCram(this)
  .withStopWords(StopWords.ENGLISH + " shall")
  .fromTextFile(myFile)
  .withFont("serif")
  .sizedByWeight(100, 1200)
  .withPlacer(Placers.swirl())
  .drawAll();

With the new way, you don’t have to remember which order the parts go in. WordCram can provide defaults (notice the new version didn’t pick a Colorer or Angler?), and good overloads (for example, instead of sizedByWeight, you can use sizedByRank). The method names follow a convention, so they should be easy to remember.

Hopefully, this should make it easier to create WordCrams. If you have tons of critical-path legacy enterprise application layers written against the old stuff, don’t worry, you can still upgrade — the old methods are there, just deprecated.

New Text Sources

Another big plus is that you can make WordCrams from different text sources, like a web page:

new WordCram(this)
  .fromWebPage("http://wordcram.wordpress.com")
  .drawAll();

With the new stuff in place, it’ll become easier to add more text sources: delicious tags, twitter streams, RSS, all that.

Documentation

The last big news is documentation. There’s actual javadoc, and examples included. Once WordCram is installed into Processing, go to File > Sketchbook > libraries > WordCram > examples to see them.

Miscellany, Et Cetera

Throw in some new Anglers, Colorers, and Placers, Java stop-words (so you can WordCram java source code), bug fixes, and performance tweaks, and you’ve got a release. For all the messy details, see the release notes.

Coming Up

My next immediate goals are more tutorials, and a bunch of examples to show off the different ways you can control WordCram. After that, we’ll see — there’s still lots to do. If you have ideas for making WordCram better, I’d love to hear from you: wordcram at gmail dot com.

Go upgrade already!