NEWS - Feb 2025 - V6 - Cloud Shapes (and more)

A new feature has been added to V6 - "cloud shapes". You can now make your cloud fit into a shape like a heart, star, ellipse or triangle. Cloud shapes can either be invisible, just forcing the phrases to be placed inside the shape, or visible with a user controlled fill and stroke colors.

Note that for performance reasons, all phrases might not fit into the picked shape.

Note also that you might not have enough phrases to fill up the desired shape.

Supported shapes:

• Ellipse
• Circle
• Heart
• Triangle
• Yield sign
• Diamond
• Pentagon
• Hexagon
• Octagon
• Star, 4 points
• Star, 5 points

Another feature added to V6 is font size scaling - you can now apply a font size scale to quickly experiment with different font sizes. Let's say you have set the min font size to 5% of the mage height and the max font size to 15% of image height, the scaling feature allows you to adjust the final sizes by applying a percentage. See the new Formatting drop down menu and the scale up and down options - or use the PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN keyboard shortcuts for quick access.

NEWS - Jan 2025 - the new Animation Tab

Latest version of Bjorn's Word Clouds introduces two new features - the animation tab and web page animations.

The Animation Tab in the designer makes it easy to experiment with animated word clouds and when satisfied export the animation as video, GIF or web page.

(YT demo)

You can choose from seven different animations and you can of course control the duration of each frame and how long to freeze the last frame.

• Shuffle color list for each frame (sample)
• Highlight each frequency using the max/not-max colors (sample)
• Highlight each phrase using the max/not-max colors (sample)
• Reveal by frequency, lowest frequency phrases first (sample)
• Reveal phrase by phrase, using data table order (sample)
• Reveal phrase by phrase, sorted A-Z (sample)
• Reveal phrase by phrase, low to high frequency (sample)

NEWS - Dec 2024 - export as video

You can now export a cloud as an animated video. See the new options in the Export drop down menu.

(YT demo)

The video is divided into frames, you control how long a frame is, the default is one second.

The exported video can animate the cloud in six different ways, grouped into two sets, first group using frequencies and second set using coloring schemes.

Animate by frequency:

• Reveal phrases by frequency, one frequency at a time. First all phrases with the lowest frequence is revevaled until all frequencies are visible.
• Reveal phrase by phrase, in the order from the data source, until whole cloud visible.
• Reveal phrase by phrase, starting with the lowest frequency words, until whole cloud is visible.

Highlighting using colors:

• Reveal the whole cloud. Each frame shuffles the color list used.
• Reveal the whole cloud. Each frame highlights, using a specific color, one phrase frequency (all phrases with same frquency), all other frequencies are shown in a different color.
• Reveal the whole cloud. Each frame highlights one phrase (using a specific color), all other phrases are shown in a different color.

Nov 2024 - max and not-max colors

Word Clouds has a new simple feature for quickly highlighting words or phrases with the highest frequency - you can now enable a "max color" and a "not max color". You can of course leave the "not max color" disabled and all non-max phrases will continue to be colored using a list or a gradient. (YT demo).

Oct 2024 - new major version - v4

New major feature: color gradients. As an alternative to color lists for picking colors for each word/phrase the new version supports gradients. You pick a start and a stop color and the app will compute all colors in-between to give each word frequency a unique color. See this short YT for a quick demo.

Bug fix: The bug with clouds with word specific colors and font styles is now fixed, e.g. you can now assign a custom color to for example the word/phrase with the highest frequency. (This used to work only for for tree maps and packed circles)

The main editor window now has a context menu with hopefully useful options.

The new project dialog has an option to pick recent and popular sizes.

The new project dialog has a list of recently used templates for quicker access.

Nov 2023 - new version

On customer request data is NOT sorted on import. Instead there is a new "Sort data" option in the Options dropdown menu in the Data tab.

July 25 2023 - new version

On customer request you can now override project settings for each phrase(word) with a custom setting for Color, Bold and Italic. Check out the new columns in the Data tab.

With the new Color override you can for example color each "positive" phrase with a green color and each "negative" phrase with a red color.

Data import is also updated to support three new optional columns: Color, Bold and Italic.

Note that the colors sidebar has a new option to allow you to quickly assign a color to each selected word in the Data tab.

July 12 2023 - new version

You can now send a generated word cloud image to the Bjorn's Annotate web app for easy annotations.

Try it! Export image and in the export UX there will be a new option Annotate with the Bjorn's Annotate app. This will open the image in the Annotate app and you can for example add callouts, arrows and text.

You can see this in action in this YT video.

June 21 2023 - new version

Version 3.15 supports templates. A template specifies the look of a cloud but no data. You an apply a template when you create a new project or later. You can save any project as a template for future use. Templates are stored on your local hard drive with the .wordcloudt extension. This short YT video shows how to apply a template as well as how to create a new template.

Note that the version for Google add-ons do not support templates since Google is not supporting the modern File API for any add-ons.

June 9 2023 - new version

Word Clouds now supports background images to add a little touch to the clouds. By default the background images are displayed in gray and low opacity to not clutter the cloud (this can of course be easily changed). This version also enables AI generated background images, as seen in this short YouTube video.

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