Again with the “text cloud!” – my oh my

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  izaakmak · Member · May 26, 2009 at 5:21 pm

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  I’ve been searching and searching… There sure are a lot of things out there that can parse through a block of text and output a “text cloud.” Unfortunately all of those methods create a “cloud” as defined by things like the “Tag Cloud” and “Category Cloud” widgets, when all I want is to produce a block of text (the names of people I want to memorialize) that simply LOOKS like that kind of cloud. Yeah I know that I can do this with the HTML editor (I think), but this is a VERY long list.

  Waaay back when I was a tech. writer, I sometimes had to have one of the technical guys write DOS batch files that would parse through text to change from one format to another. What I’m hoping is that one of the very brilliant people I’ve run across in this forum knows how to create a “script” or whatever to parse through my plain text list of names (one name per line), and output each surrounded by randomly generated HTML font size codes followed by a space to an HTML file that I can copy and paste into my post.

  If anyone knows of such a generator, can point me to resources that I can learn to produce one from, or is willing to take on the challenge themselves, then please let me know. The appealing look of the output from such a generator – not to mention the possibilities for enhancement (such as hover over effects, and variations of font and color), makes me wonder why such a thing hasn’t already been created (if it hasn’t).

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)