Posts Tagged ‘script’

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Wordalizer tag cloud script for InDesign | A Tribute to Wordle (Indiscripts)

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

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[Editor’s note: Looks like my earlier post on Wordle helped Marc Atret implement tag clouds (word clouds) in InDesign.]

Republished from Indiscripts.

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.

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.

Continue reading at Indiscripts . . .

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Posted in Charting, Promote, scripting, Software | Comments Off on Wordalizer tag cloud script for InDesign | A Tribute to Wordle (Indiscripts)

Scriptopedia: JS, AS, and VBA scripts for Create Suite apps

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

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[Editor’s note: New script compendium. Some for Illustrator, many for InDesign.]

Republished from Scriptopedia.

Eddy and I are very pleased to announce the release of the scripts library for the Adobe Software and desktop publishing and photography.
Pointing out the dispersion of the scripts over the Internet, we have decided to offer a unique space gathering the best in the automation field.

Javascript, Applescript, VisualBasic or action scripts will be warmly hosted here.

If you want to make part of this adventure and help us filling the base, don’t hesitate and contact us !

We hope you enjoy surfing on this site and using the scripts as much as we had creating Scriptopedia.org.

Thanks in advance and…

Check out Scriptopedia . . .

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Posted in Promote, scripting, Software | Comments Off on Scriptopedia: JS, AS, and VBA scripts for Create Suite apps

Time and Again, the Calendar Comes Up Short (Wall Street Journal)

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

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[Editor’s note: If you haven’t gotten a 2010 calendar yet, please try my Illustrator script for making your own. Its nifty! Many of my projects last year focused on time and less on mapping. It can be harder to count days than you might think!!!]

Republished from the Wall Street Journal.
By CHARLES FORELLE

Sticklers for Symmetry Lament Imperfections in the 400-Year-Old Gregorian System; Earth’s Inconvenient Orbit

Friday marks the start of another new year, and for a small band of reformers, another missed opportunity.

For the 428th straight year, much of the world will again use the familiar Gregorian calendar. We will suffer the fiscal quarters of varying lengths and the 52 weeks that don’t quite fill the year. We will recite rhymes to recall how many days are in June, and shrug if we are asked whether Halloween is on a weekday.

Almost since Pope Gregory XIII promulgated the new calendar — itself a reform of Julius Caesar’s calendar — in 1582, proposals have bubbled up for something better.

Apostles of efficiency lament that each year needs a fresh wall calendar. The astronomically precise complain that Gregory’s leap-year formula (every four years, except centuries not divisible by 400) is erratic, and a hair off the real year’s length anyway. The financially fixated sigh that next year there will be more shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas than this year.

“We have a world-wide consensus about this second-rate calendar that the pope imposed 400 years ago,” Simon Cassidy, a California software engineer and amateur calendar scholar, says by telephone from New Zealand, where he is spending the northern-hemisphere winter.

Creating a calendar is like fitting a lot of round pegs into not quite as many square holes. Western tradition demands a seven-day week. Ancient custom, rooted in moon cycles, calls for a 12-month year. The Earth’s tilted axis produces four seasons. But the Earth, uncooperatively, takes 365 days, plus a tad more, to go once around the sun, and 365 is divisible by none of seven, 12 or four. And thanks to the extra bit of time — about one-fourth of a day — required for a complete orbit, leap years are needed to keep things on track.

Continue reading at the Wall Street Journal . . .

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Posted in General, scripting, Self promo | Comments Off on Time and Again, the Calendar Comes Up Short (Wall Street Journal)

A Magic Wand for Selecting Text in Adobe Illustrator – 11e (KELSO)

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

[Editor’s note: The beta had expired; this is purely an extension of the testing period to November 2010. No new features. I’ve been caught up in Natural Earth the last year and will return to the project at a date uncertain.]

I have been developing a plugin / script for Adobe Illustrator to make it easier to select type in Illustrator by attributes like font family, style, size, and fill color. I hope to release this as a commercial plugin for designers and cartographers at some point. If you would like to beta test this plugin for me, please send me an email at nathaniel@kelsocartography.com or…

Download version 11e of Find and Replace Fonts Script (1.6m). Good thru November 2010.

More information on this script available in this March 2009 post.

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Posted in Best practices, Design, Mapping, Print, Self promo, Software | 11 Comments »

“Size By Luminance” a.k.a. Halftones!!! (Wundes)

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

[Editor’s note: This new script from John achieves that old fashioned halftone look found in ancient newspapers and magazines.]

Republished from John Wundes’ JS4AI blog.

Want to make halftones in illustrator?

You could go the auto trace route, or you could go with a plug-in from Phantasm. The Phantasm plug-in is powerful and gives you great control, so I do recommend using their product, but if you’re on a tight budget, you can try my new script which is easy, and free.

First off, if you don’t know about the “Mosaic Filter” in Illustrator, read this quick article. The Mosaic Filter is an amazingly under-used feature and it will do most of the heavy lifting for us today. Filter>Create>Object Mosaic

Continue reading at the JS4AI blog . . .

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Posted in Best practices, Design, Print, Promote, scripting, Software | 1 Comment »

A Magic Wand for Selecting Text in Adobe Illustrator (KELSO)

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

[Editor’s note: The beta expired so this is purely an extension of the testing period. No new feature.]

I have been developing a plugin / script for Adobe Illustrator to make it easier to select type in Illustrator by  attributes like font family, style, size, and fill color. I hope to release this as a commercial plugin for designers and cartographers late 2009? If you would like to beta test this plugin for me, please send me an email at nathaniel@kelsocartography.com or…

Download version 11d of Find and Replace Fonts Script (1.6m). Good thru summer 2009.

More information on this script available in this March 2009 post.

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Posted in Best practices, Design, Mapping, Print, Self promo, Software | 1 Comment »

Great Script for Simplifying Paths in Illustrator (Kelso)

Monday, March 30th, 2009

[Editor’s note: Cartographers looking for Douglas-Peucker type line simplication in Illustrator now have a solution to Illustrator’s default simplify command when trying to generalize features like river oxbows. Jim started on the problem of fixing an Illustrator bug (see image above) where redundant points were created in the path outline command, and now has a more generalized solution.]

Jim Heck shared an amazing tool for Adobe Illustrator with me recently to deal with the irritating bug in versions CS3 and CS4 where redundant points (stacked on top of each other, illustrated above where the dupplicate points are pulled away from the basic shape) are created on outline or offset of a path’s stroke. The script (in Javascript) and Action set he created quickly remove these redundant points while still keeping the path shape. He does this with a bit of behind the scenes trigonometry wizardry. Please note this bug still exists in CS4 contray to rumors, though is lesser virulent form than CS3 (confirmed by me via email with Adobe engineers).

I’ve worked with Jim to refine it the last couple weeks. I think it’s ready for prime time now.

Screenshots:

Settings shown to remove redundant points for outlined path screenshot above. I used a tolerance of 12 points for the river ox bow screenshot below.

How it works:

  • Selected path points only or all document paths
  • Set distance tolerance in page units (optional)
  • Works in locked objects
  • Works in compound paths
  • Reporting, Selection, and Removal modes

Cartographic applications:

I illustrate below the result of using Jim’s generalization script on a typial river path and you can see in area 1a and 2b how the ox bow removal is light years above Illustrator’s default path simplify command which grossly distorts the shape in the pursuit of point removal. Jim’s script preserves the shape and removes the tiny, tight wiggles. It needs a little bit more programming work to fix areas 1b and 2a + 2c where the shape is loosing some fidelity for not keeping the trailing point in the series of removed points. And maybe needing to keep an intermediary point between 2a and 2c for shape since this is a longer removal?

With a little more tweaking, this tool will become popular for cartographers since we often want to simplify lines while keeping the overall geometry shape when reducing clustered points. The opposite may be achievable, too, when adding points selectively to long curves, but NOT to segments of the line that are already dense with points. But that’s for a 2.0 release 😉

Download the script and actions from Jim Heck’s site . . .

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Posted in Best practices, Mapping, Mountain Carto, Promote, scripting, Software | 8 Comments »

Periodic Table of Typefaces (Behance)

Friday, March 13th, 2009

[Editor’s note: View 100 of the most popular, influential, and notorious typefaces (fonts) arranged in a Periodic Table for quick reference and amusement. Thanks Lynda!]

Republished from Behance Network.
Click image above for larger view.

The Periodic Table of Typefaces is obviously in the style of all the thousands of over-sized Periodic Table of Elements posters hanging in schools and homes around the world.  This particular table lists 100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces today.

As with traditional periodic tables, this table presents the subject matter grouped categorically.  The Table of Typefaces groups by families and classes of typefaces:  sans-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed.

Each cell of the table lists the typeface and a one or two character “symbol” (made up by me simply based on logic), the designer, year designed and a ranking of 1 through 100.

Ranking was determined by statistically sorting and combining lists and opinions from the the sites listed below.  The final overall ranking was achieved depending on how many lists the particular typeface was presented on and it’s ranking on the lists (if the particular source list used a ranking system; some did not, in which case just the typeface’s presence on the list boosted it’s overall score.)  After averaging the typefaces appearances and rankings a composite score was given and the list was sorted on a spreadsheet then finally given an overall score of 1 through 100 based on its final resting position.

Continue reading at Behance Network . . .

(below) Detail from the Periodic Table of Typefaces.

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A Magic Wand for Selecting Text in Adobe Illustrator (KELSO)

Friday, March 6th, 2009

[Editor’s note: This is largely a republish of my post here last September and before but with the added benefit of now being a public alpha (download version 11d) of the script that is good thru summer 2009. Why am I expanding testing? I’d like more feedback as I haven’t heard of any major problems with the script. And I need a little motivation to finish programming 😉 ]

I have been developing a plugin / script for Adobe Illustrator to make it easier to select type in Illustrator by  attributes like font family, style, size, and fill color. I hope to release this as a commercial plugin for designers and cartographers first quarter 2009? If you would like to beta test this plugin for me, please send me an email at nathaniel@kelsocartography.com or…

Download version 11d of Find and Replace Fonts Script (1.6m). Good thru summer 2009.

¡¡Warning!! This is not final release-quality product!!! Please save your work before running the script. I have never had it crash my machine but don’t take chances!!! Use at your own risk!!!

To install new scripts you need to:

  • Download the ZIP file using “Save as”.
  • Quit Illustrator
  • Copy the script files into the Illustrator application folder’s “Presets” » “Scripts” subfolder
  • After restarting Illustrator, you can find the scripts in the menu “File” » “Scripts”;
  • TIP: You can create subfolders in the scripts folder to organize your scripts

NOTE: You will need version CS3 or CS4 of Illustrator. If you have CS or CS2, get a trial version of CS4 from Adobe.

Insure you get further updates to the Script by joining this email list:
Name:
E-mail:

What is this tool and why would you use it?

  1. A magic wand for clicking on text and selecting like-styled text
  2. A non-modal eye dropper tool for copying font attributes and pasting them onto other text objects without directly eye dropping (like Freehand’s copy and past attributes).
  3. Menu items for Select > Type > Same font, same style, same size, same font color, overprinting, etc
  4. A pro version of the Find Fonts dialog already in Illustrator that does find / replacing in locked and hidden layers, or only in the active layer, sublayer, or window view.

Usage Tips

The resulting non-contiguous text can only be affected (eg: by the Character panel) by:

  1. Hitting escape on the keyboard and then making changes
    • but the original instance will not be changed
    • all others will be, though
  2. The entire text object was selected
  3. Initiating the “similar text (described in 2nd New features below) in text object mode, NOT text range or text insertion point mode.
  4. Using the Full Dialog mode’s replace functions
Looking Forward

Developing the plugin has taken a lot longer than I expected to implement all the basic and advanced features but I am now 90% complete with the script version, which is over 8,000 lines of code or a 300 page book! I need to start working on the plugin version which will entail completely translating the script from JavaScript into C in XCode on the Mac and Visual Studio on the PC.

  • Port to XCode and start testing as Illustrator Plugin, first for Mac, second for Windows

  • Settle on price and start selling. Perhaps thru a distributor.

  • There will be a cheap version and a pro version.

Turning the script into a plugin will bring several benefits:

  • Speed: much faster execution
  • Work with 1,000s of type objects / characters, not 100s
  • Menu items that can be assigned keyboard shortcuts
  • Can be recorded with Actions for automating routine tasks
  • New tool: magic wand for text and non-modal eyedropper for text font appearances
  • Allow me to recoup development costs

Example uses:

  • Selection:
    • Find all other type objects with same font – View video
    • Find all other type objects with same type size – View video
    • Find all other type objects with same character fill color
  • Applying / creating character styles:
    • Cartographer: ArcMap text imported to Illustrator >> have plugin apply matching style or create new styles that match each of the implicate styles
    • Designer: Quickly comp out a design and select all matching text with certain font attributes with the new Text magic wand tool and make them styles. Great for deadline projects.
  • Find and Replace fonts on hidden and locked layers (better than Illustrator’s default Find Font)

Demonstration videos:

Selecting by Font Color – Basic

Including exactly the same color, pattern, swatch, same color mode, by character and by object.

View video – 7.8 megs

Selecting by Font Color – Advanced

Including selecting type object NOT a color and overprints, replacing with knockout.

View video – 17.2 megs

Changing Alignment and Registration of Type

Includes limiting to just point, area, or line type objects

View video – 11.0 megs

Why Change the Registration for Point Type?

To scale type size when it is registered to a townspot or other graphic element.

View video – 1.1 meg

Finding Scope

Limit your selection to active layer, sublayer, current view, selection, artboard/page, and document.

View video – 20 megs

Finding by Text Content

Find all type that has the “River” or “Road” or “Street” in it and then change those text range’s attributes. Options include Is, Starts, Ends, and more.

View video – 13.5 megs

Replacing by Text Contents

With exact phrase or add to the end or beginning of the matched text.

View video – 9.3 megs

Simplified Interface

This dialog is similar to what’d you see for the planned “magic wand” for type tool settings. Thanks to Tom for this suggestion!

View video – 7.6 megs

FEATURES NEW THIS VERSION (and the Last)

  1. Significant speed increase
    • Will now deal with 100s of text objects (or characters in a single text object)

    • But still slow in 1000s of text objects; change seach scope to text frame for best result
  2. Now selects ranges of text, not just text objects!
  3. “Just do it” non-dialog scripts
    • Select text with same font face and style
    • Select text with same font size
    • Select text with same font face, style, and size
    • Select like text within current selection
  4. Zoom to next and previous matching objects

  5. Can initiate “similar” text font styling based on currently selected

    • Text object

    • Selected text range within text object

    • Text insertion point within text object
  6. Non-contiguous text that matches search criteria will be selected in the same text object
  7. Character styles can now be found and replaced
  8. Find options revamped
  9. Selection (results) scope now functional
  10. Hidden and locked layers now (mostly?) functional
  11. Less use of pure math logic in GU

  12. Fill color now works.

  13. Registration and Justification now work

  14. Simple dialog interface

  15. Search in active layer, active sublayer, and current document view

STILL NOT FIXED
  • Character styles has a few bugs relating to color

  • Find by text string still hinky

CONCLUSION

Please let me know what you think, what bugs you find, and how it can be made more useful. Send to nathaniel@kelsocartography.com.

If you couldn’t find the download links above, here it is again:

http://kelsocartography.com/beta/frf/files/FindReplaceFonts_a11d.zip

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Posted in Best practices, Design, Interactive, Mapping, Print, scripting, Self promo, Software | 6 Comments »

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