Creating cool posters from Wikipedia articles
Sunday, October 5th by Ben YatesSo I’ve been experimenting a little with procedurally generated type layouts.
What if you could create a poster out of any wikipedia article and the text cascaded down in a logarithmic pattern — the same waves-out-to-the-horizon effect as when you look at the ocean. Like this:
Here’s the software. Unfortunately, I suck at programming, so you have to run it through XCode. And you also have to have Adobe Illustrator and BBEdit installed.
- Unzip the files
- Double click on WikipediaPrint.xcodeproj. (XCode comes with macs but you may have to install it.)
- Click on “build and go” in the toolbar.
Now you’re running the program. Type the name of anything into the search box, and click the button at the bottom. Here’s a quick and slightly disorganized video tutorial:
October 5th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
This is pretty cool! Do you think you could do Yo-yo and Yokohama Kaidashi KikÅ? Thanks!
October 5th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Oops, it looks like the blog software didn’t like the last character. That could be “Kikou” instead.
October 6th, 2008 at 5:22 am
You don’t need to distribute entire XCode project - look into build/Release - there’s a standalone .app there.
October 6th, 2008 at 8:51 am
kL: Unfortunately the project doesn’t work as a standalone (at least not for me). Are you a programmer? Do you think you could troubleshoot?
October 6th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Shawn: Okay, the posters are in benyates.info/wikiposters. (I had to manually fix the second article because the program has a bug that sometimes strips out the title.)
Again, if anyone’s a programmer and wants to help make the software less crappy, let me know.
October 6th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Ben, thanks very much. If I had more time, I’d try my hand at this in Python. Maybe some day…
October 7th, 2008 at 4:12 am
Cool… have a go making these using python and cairo - it’ll work cross platform and no illustrator needed.