pdbwords was written by Kresten Lindorff-Larsen, University of Copenhagen, in 2015.
I cannot guarantee that your eyes will not start to bleed if you read the code.
The main ingredient of pdbwords is a protein alphabet, developed by Mark Howarth: http://www.bioch.ox.ac.uk/howarth/alphabet.htm
The python code is distributed under GNU General Public License v3.0
./pdbwords.py Just write your text here to set it in PDBWORDS
The code is essentially a wrapper for ImageMagick, which needs to be installed separately; see http://www.imagemagick.org
I have only tested the code under macOS
Currently the letters A-Z can be used, and it is also possible to use . , ! ? :
All letters will be set as uppercase letters, but you can input as either lower or upper.
Every unknown characters will be set as a space.
Lines will be broken up so that there are no more than MAXCHARS (hardcoded in script) characters on each line. If you want to force a line break, just write xLBx as a (case sensitive) word (again, hardcoded in LINEBREAK in script).
The two last features makes the following hack work to insert blank lines xLBx @ xLBx (which forces a line break, then the @ is converted to a space (it is unknown) and then a new linebreak. Not elegant, but it works.
The letters were mostly discovered by Mark Howarth and are described in a paper: http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal/v22/n5/full/nsmb.3011.html and a website: http://www.bioch.ox.ac.uk/howarth/alphabet.htm