Hey... you responded - that's a very pleasant surprise. I thought that website was long dead! - still very impressive work!

Wow! This is super awesome! I've been meaning to implement something like this for years! Thanks so much! It's especially awesome that you've implemented it as an Inkscape plugin since that's my vector editor of choice.

That's always good to hear!

How do I get and use the extension? Did you mean to attach it to the email?

Yeah sorry, that e-mail was really directed at the rest of the inkscape devel people, so you'll find the extension in our SVN trunk. You can check out just the share/extensions/ subdir with a command like this:

svn checkout https://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/inkscape/inkscape/trunk/share/e... extensions

You just need to grab these files:

share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.inx share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.py share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup_config.py

and

share/extensions/alphabet_soup/*.svg

The extension will probably be released officially in v0.47 - the next release after the upcoming 0.46 and 0.46.1 builds. So it could be a little while before it becomes public.

The original alphabetsoup script *does* allow for totally random generation, just use -g instead of -r:

./alphabetsoup.py -g "Hello World"

Yes I saw that in the original code. I just havn't exposed that functionality to the user in this first attempt.

Anyway, do feel free to give any comments, suggestions, code-mods etc. after all this is still your baby!

Thanks again, Joel

On Tue, 2008-03-18 at 16:49 -0700, Matt Chisholm wrote:

Wow! This is super awesome! I've been meaning to implement something like this for years! Thanks so much! It's especially awesome that you've implemented it as an Inkscape plugin since that's my vector editor of choice.

How do I get and use the extension? Did you mean to attach it to the email?

The original alphabetsoup script *does* allow for totally random generation, just use -g instead of -r:

./alphabetsoup.py -g "Hello World"

So you should be able to hook the plugin into that part of the original code.

-matt

On Mar 18 2008, 22:37, Joel Holdsworth wrote:

...

Hi All,

Thought you might all be interested to know that I've just submitted a new python extension: Alphabet Soup. Alphabet Soup is a vector/SVG derivative of Matt Chrisholm's orignal GPLed raster script (from here http://www.theory.org/artprojects/alphabetsoup/main.html ).

In simple terms Alphabet Soup makes a soup out of your alphabet. Type a string into it, and it will render the characters of that string, but with the strokes and serifs etc all mixed up. This is all achieved by a set of rules which control how the algorithm combines together the pieces of the Computer Postmodern Font (<-- that's one of Matt jokes, get it??). Try it out - or see the attached SVG. Obviously this script's usefulness is quite limited, but it is sorta fun and creative - might help new users fall in love with inkscape.

In a while I might roll out an extra function carried over from the Matt's original script, which allows unreadable characters to be generated completely randomly - rather than as variations of normal latin characters. This extra function when it comes will allow the script to make totally alien writing.

All the best Joel