/word-o-mat

RoboFont extension for making test words

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

word-o-mat v3.0

Thanks to the contributions of @arialcrime, @gferreira and @cjdunn who have helped word-o-mat work under RoboFont 3!

Looking for words that contain ‘q’ but not ‘u’? Or French words that use an ‘a’, a ‘g’, at least one ascender, and one diagonal, but only the ones you’ve marked green? Or words in which to see a specific letter combination, like ‘fk’ or ‘Yc’? This is the sort of thing that word-o-mat can help you with. It's an extension for RoboFont that generates words for use in type sketching, spacing, testing etc.

word-o-mat screenshot

Version 2.2.6 should be py3 compatible -- thanks to Frederik Berlaen and Gustavo Ferreira!

New in major version 2.2:

  • GREP pattern matching: As an alternative to specifying lists of required letters (which is still there and unchanged), word-o-mat now also supports pattern matching with regular expressions for more fine-grained control. (Please make sure your regex does not contradict parameters set in the “Basic settings” panel, as the script does not [yet] cleverly check for such things.)

  • Use mark color to constrain character set (experimental): Hit the color swatch and select a mark color used in your font (in the color interface, you can find them under Swatches > “RoboFont mark colors”). Word-o-mat will then only use glyphs marked precisely that color. Feedback on this functionality is welcome.

  • Language support: Additional option to get words in any available language (mind that this will be slower). Also new wordlists for Latin, Polish, Icelandic, Vietnamese syllables (the latter is a rather short list, but I thought it may still be useful to include). Implemented correct capitalization of German ß to SS.

  • Interface cleanups, improved error handling, bugfixes. I also updated the Help, in case anyone is looking at that :)

Extended Language Support:

  • word-o-mat is UTF-8 compliant, so you can also use it for languages other than English (I’ve only tested it for Latin-based languages for now). This uses the Unicode info of the glyphs, so make sure you have your codepoints assigned properly.

  • Ships with built-in word lists for: English, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Slovak, Spanish, and Vietnamese syllables. Word lists usually contain between 5.000 and 30.000 words each (only the Vietnamese one is much shorter) and are derived from various open/CC licensed sources; please check the individual files for details. Some of these word lists still contain errors and stray words from other languages; the ones italicized above have been manually checked and fixed: German & Dutch (Nina Stössinger), Norwegian (Sindre Bremnes of Monokrom), French (La Police Type Foundry with David Hodgetts), Catalan (Joancarles Casasín), Italian (Roberto Arista), and Latin which was greatly expanded/improved by Tobias Frere-Jones. Thanks! – You can also use custom wordlists. (For best results use UTF-8 encoding.)

If you find any bugs or have suggestions for future development, please get in touch, or fix them yourself :)