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Show HN: Word Doodle – A generative engine that turns text into dense doodle art
I have always loved the look of dense, hand-drawn doodle sketches. The art that filled every part of a notebook page or paper with words and character drawings. Using word-doodle, I have recreated that feeling, including simulation of the process of filling the page but for text only and also emojis.
How it works:
The engine uses a three-step pipeline to transform raw text into art:
1. Frequency Mapping: It analyzes word frequency to determine visual weight of each word.
2. Scaling & Rotation: High-frequency words get bolded and enlarged, with a 15% chance of vertical rotation.
3. Collision Detection: It uses a randomized coordinate generator with a retry loop (up to 70 attempts per word) to pack the canvas as tightly as possible without overlapping.
The Goal:
Beyond just a word cloud, it is something relaxing to watch. It’s built with vanilla JS to keep it lightweight as possible.
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/j-ncel/word-doodle https://github.com/j-ncel/word-doodle
- koalux 8mo agoTry pasting in a project README, some song lyrics, or a poem to test it. As addition, the engine maps word size to raw frequency without filtering out conjunctions(like "and," "or," "the"). Because these are statistically the most common, they often become the largest, boldest across the doodle. You could call it a limitation of the simple parser used or maybe also see it as a feature.