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After taking a long and probably underserved vacation with my wife, I am back to work and happy to announce that Stylish Word Clouds 3.0 is now available for download from the Apple App Store.

This is a major overhaul of the app that contains many significant bug fixes and performance improvements, but also a large number of new features. Here’s the complete list:

Layout

Three new ways to arrange a cloud, alongside the two spirals:

• Mosaic — words set in justified rows, the way type is set on a poster, rather
  than scattered. No rotation and no gaps at the ends of lines.
• Open Space — each word sent straight to the nearest opening it fits in, found by
  measuring where the room is rather than by walking outward until it trips over some.
• Even Spread — each word sent to the emptiest part of the canvas instead of the
  nearest opening, so the words work outward from the first one. A few words on a large
  canvas fill it corner to corner instead of floating in the middle of it.
• Word spacing sets the border each word keeps around itself, in points. Turn it down for dense packing, up for an airy arrangement.

Type

• Text effects — an outline and a drop shadow, set per font rather than for the
  whole cloud, so a display face and a text face can be treated differently. Both are
  measured as a proportion of the type size, so a 72 pt word and a 12 pt word are
  outlined in the same relationship rather than the same number of points.
• Font pairing by rank — keep the first font for the most frequent words and choose
  how many that is; everything behind them cycles through the remaining fonts. The
  alternative, dealing the fonts round one at a time, is still there.
• Letter case — draw the words as written, in lower case, UPPERCASE, or Capitalized,
  independently of how they were counted.
• Font size scale — choose how a word’s count becomes its size: linear, square root,
  or logarithmic. Real text is heavily skewed, and a straight linear mapping pins every
  word but the most frequent one to the minimum size.

Color

• Color from a picture — the cloud takes each word’s color from a photograph at the
  point the word sits on it.
• Color by frequency — spread the palette across the size range so color carries
  frequency as well as size, instead of cycling by position.
• Depth — fade the rarer words back, so the cloud reads as having depth.

Words

• Phrase detection — words that keep appearing together are kept as one entry:
  “machine learning” rather than “machine” and “learning”, two words that each look
  half as important as the idea. A checkbox on the drop window decides this per
  document, starting from your setting.
• Merge — select several rows in the word table and combine them into one, adding
  their counts together.
• Per-word control — give a single word its own emphasis, its own color, or keep it
  horizontal while the rest of the cloud turns.
• Editing — change a word and its count directly.
• More languages counted properly — stop-word lists for Japanese, Chinese and Korean,
  a Dutch list brought up to the standard one, and a minimum word length that understands
  scripts, so Chinese and Japanese words are no longer filtered out for being short.

Canvas and export

• Canvas size — the cloud is now composed at a size of its own (A4, US Letter, etc.)
  in both orientations, or any other size you name.
• PNG export options — choose the resolution, and a transparent or white background.
• Export word clouds animations in SVG Documents
• Unsaved work is protected — closing a window or quitting asks before discarding
  changes, and the window shows as edited while there is something to lose.
• More documents can be read — RTF, Word and OpenDocument files, and plain text in
  whatever encoding it was saved in rather than assuming UTF-8.
• Clearer failure messages. A file that yields nothing now says why: it is empty, it could
  not be read, or it is a PDF of page images with no text in it.
• Older files keep opening — documents, shapes, color schemes and presets are read
  field by field, so a file written before a setting existed still opens.
• Changing an import setting offers to reprocess the open document rather than doing
  it silently or not at all.

I am quite happy with the result and I hope you all enjoy using Stylish Word Clouds 3.0.