Comments on: Wordle – Beautiful Tag Clouds

By: nathaniel

nathaniel — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:28:07 +0000

Nifty! Thanks for sharing I’d love to be able to select my own shapes to fit the tag clouds into with such a tool as yours. When you’re farther along on development please let me know and incorporate some of your code into my Illustrator tool. BTW, the Flash example you posted goes slower than 40 per 3 seconds, more like 1 every second for me.

By: Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:53:15 +0000

I started to work on a ActionScript version: http://www.leichtgewicht.at/106/road-to-tag-cloud-1/

By: nathaniel

nathaniel — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:17:40 +0000

Yes, Flash is great at doing hit tests. The default is full shape hitTesting (not bounding box)… and you can even set up proxy shapes to result in hitTests on primary objects

See here for working example with code:
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/hittest.htm

You would make a movieClip container for each tag word/phrase and make a textField inside each with the actual tag content. Then do the same placement logic you already have based on the movieClip containers. It should be fast and elegant.

But Flash is not as good about printing (the default is to rasterize vector elements) so you’d have to work around that if someone were to still use it as a production tool.

By: Jonathan Feinberg

Jonathan Feinberg — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:20:18 +0000

Does Flash provide something analogous to Java’s Shape, that will enable you to do that kind of hit-testing? I’ve always assumed I couldn’t have implemented Wordle in Flash.

By: nathaniel

nathaniel — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:13:34 +0000

Ah, so I’d have to do the final positioning in Flash’s ActionScript instead of Adobe Illustrator’s ExtendScript to get the true-shape hit-tests instead of the rough-bounding boxes. Perhaps I’ll just write a script that opens your PDF and converts to CMYK

By: Jonathan Feinberg

Jonathan Feinberg — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:33:15 +0000

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.