A word cloud is a graphical representation of a weighted set of words. Weight is usually indicated by colour or font size. More on word clouds at Wikipedia.
Word clouds are cool and pretty.
I've written a library for producing pretty word
clouds. It's based
on Wordle.net,
which is an excellent web site for generating word clouds,
using a Java applet.
Here is a screenshot of a word cloud
of #haskell's
IRC logs (by Wordle):
See how it fits the letters into eachother? That's brilliant, and pretty, and I think the Java Font API has something to do with it. Unfortunately it is closed source, so it is difficult to use in programs or automated setups, and has less configuration potential. So I figured I'd write a library that does what I like about Wordle.
Here is the first image I generated after compiling, the whole of `Beautiful concurrency':
Here is a 70 word cloud of Sophistical Refutations by Aristotle:
Concurrency articles by Simon Peyton Jones:
Try it here (paste some stuff into it)
We can configure the number of words, seen here by increasing the Aristotle word cloud to 150 words:
There are some problems with this cloud compared to the 70 word version: