Some tools for Wordle lovers

Mike Parrott of the WordleUsers Yahoo group has been teaching the rest of us how to do all sorts of things with Wordle using the advanced input screen. He gave instructions for manipulating the data in a spreadsheet, which I turned into online templates that anyone can use. Hope you enjoy them!

Spreadsheet for more flexible Wordles

Spreadsheet for single word (or phrase) Wordles

Character map templates for Inkscape and Illustrator

Back in the day, there was a great free program for the Mac called TypeBook, which I used to print specimen sheets and character maps for my fonts. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the leap to OS X. I have been using an Excel spreadsheet to print character maps for my giant collection of dingbat fonts in the intervening years, but wanted to make something easier to use and to share. The result is my Inkscape version that you can download here.

And I also made a version for Adobe Illustrator that you can download here. Illustrator has a built in character table (Type menu>Glyphs), but if you want something to print out, this will come in handy.

Here’s what a completed page looks like for my 09kutups font.

Make a dingbat font with Inkscape

Buried in Inkscape .47 is the ability to make your own SVG fonts. This isn’t all that exciting because even Inkscape can’t use SVG fonts. However, pair this with a free font conversion tool and you now have a way to create your own TrueType fonts for free! The font creation features are not well developed yet, and there is precious little documentation, but after playing with this quite a while I have finally come up with a set of procedures that works. View/download the tutorial (PDF) here. View the video here. If you develop an original font for digital diecutters, please let me know so I can post it on my fonts page.

Related links

• fontstarter.svg file Inkscape file to be used with the tutorial
• Dingbat map webapp (Windows) for viewing your completed font
• Online Font Converter or Free Font Converter
• Inkscape documentation covering font editor
• See and download some example fonts at Denise’s Scrapbooking Room

SCAL vs Make The Cut feature war continues

Both MTC and SCAL have released new versions over the last couple of days. Both of these programs now have most of the features we previously had to use Inkscape for! Please see the link below for the latest version of my comparison chart.

http://cleversomeday.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/cricut-software-comparison/

I heart U pop up for CDS

This is a repost so I can try and get linked up with the freeebie sites. It is also timely again with Valentines Day just around the corner.

You can download the .cut file here.

For more details see the original post here.

And a reminder for you SCAL/MTC users that I have a font to make pop-ups for any word here.