To use GNU/Linux’s text pro­cess­ing abil­i­ties for graphic design, I needed to find a way to expand this world of plain text. My approach here­fore is the auto­mated gen­er­a­tion of plain text con­trol files, that serve as input for soft­ware, that extends the world of plain text.

Lists are the most sim­ple exam­ple for a con­trol file. For the cre­ation of lists I would describe two dif­fer­ent approaches: cre­ation and analy­sis .

cre­ation

INPUTDIR=i/pdf/alphabets
LIST=$TMPDIR/sentence.list
 
for LETTER in H E L L O W O R L D do find ${INPUTDIR} -name "$LETTER*.pdf" |\ shuf -n 1 >> $LIST done

Within this loop I want to find a match­ing pdf file for every let­ter in the sen­tence HELLO WORLD.
The pdf files were cre­ated in advance, all let­ters in dif­fer­ent fonts.

The result:

i/pdf/alphabets/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/H.pdf
i/pdf/alphabets/_eufm10________/E.pdf
i/pdf/alphabets/_eufm10________/L.pdf
i/pdf/alphabets/_Courier_New___/L.pdf
i/pdf/alphabets/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/O.pdf
i/pdf/alphabets/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/W.pdf
i/pdf/alphabets/_Webdings______/O.pdf
i/pdf/alphabets/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/R.pdf
i/pdf/alphabets/_Webdings______/L.pdf
i/pdf/alphabets/_Webdings______/D.pdf

analy­sis

INPUTDIR=i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/
LIST=$TMPDIR/alphabet.list
 
ls -rS ${INPUTDIR}/*.pdf > $LIST

ls -S is the com­mand to list files in a order accord­ing to their file size.

The selected files are ran­dom words stored as pdf files. The idea is to get a sort­ing depen­dent on the com­plex­ity of the words. The file size is con­nected to the amount of vec­tor path infor­ma­tion. A let­ter with a com­plex form pro­duces a big­ger file size. The file­size of a word is there­fore depen­dent on num­ber and com­plex­ity of its let­ters.

The result:

i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/lollopy.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/sculpt.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/dovelike.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/pubes.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/Clerus.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/canelo.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/Mezentius.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/denounce.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/tiptoppish.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/focometry.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/ungeneric.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/periocular.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/gynarchic.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/polycythemic.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/untrinitarian.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/scaldweed.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/enchondrosis.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/unscathedly.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/phlebotomical.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/transferred.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/photophysical.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/balaenoidean.pdf
i/pdf/words/_Nimbus_Sans_L_/hyperterrestrial.pdf

The visual results

The lists are used to gen­er­ate pdf files in the next step.