As Gramham van de Ruit tweeted about a Sudoku Generator for InDesign I had to look up the possibilities of making such a tool for Scriptographer. I’ve had this idea before but I’ve never put any effort into it. Not surprisingly, it is a fairly complex matter. Fortunately, a friendly soul, named David J. Rager,  had posted the source code of his online javascript Sudoku Generator (+solver) on his blog. Being the opportunist that I am I quickly “borrowed” (well, he said it was free to use) his code and from that it was an oh-so-easy task to just wrap some Sg code around it for use in Illustrator!

The script generates puzzles and renders them in full vector. Everything; the frame, hints and a non-visible solution, are included inside a group object. Find it here.

Although having nothing to do with me, I found this nice treelike structure that exhibits the Fibonacci number properties (the increasing branches) which is not very hard to achieve with an L-System. At its most basic form it would look like this.

Axiom: A

A → AB

B → A

I’m fairly happy with the script as it gets the job done and it is available for download here. There are a lot of tweaks to be made, for sure, but these curves are all produced in Illustrator. This is one of my favourite grammars, the Cesaro’s Sweep. It is actually a variant of the Koch Snowflake but I think it looks like trees. Another one of many variants of the Koch curve. This is a Quadratic Koch Island. The last one is called a dragon curve. The keen observer will also recognize this as the curve from the Jurassic Park book. There is also a pretty handy Java applet by Christopher G. Jennings to play with here.

Now, with the apparent “high” demand I quickly hopped to it and threw together a very crude EAN-13 (which is actually the same as ISBN) barcode generator and posted it in his forum post under the name of ‘BarTender.js’ as I didn’t think it could warrant a real script release.

Roughly two and a half months passed until Graham posted a reply and with it a modified version of my script, where the biggest change was making the text look a lot nicer, and he appropriatly re-named the script ‘BarMaid.js’. Nice touch.

While my original intention was to make a full-fledged barcode generator with support of different kinds of symbologies I knew I had to re-write the code completely. But, as scripting isn’t something that comes very natural to me, I am really struggling to come to terms with a lot of stuff. Though the progress is slow; thankfully, the journey is a pretty steady and enjoyable one.
As of now I have managed to re-write the EAN-13 routine, making it a bit more effective, and I have also added support for the Code 39 symbology, which is pictured at the top. More to come…

As you can see this results in a circle divided into 7 equal parts. Below, I have chosen to draw the letter ‘d’ which has a binary unicode value of ’1100100′. Well actually the correct value should be ’01100100′, eight digits, but somehow javascript omits the first ’0′ in standard Latin-1 as a letter from the extended Latin-1 such as ‘ö’ has a value of ’11110110′. Therefore, for now, my script will only print characters in the range of 32-127.

I have also added some functions to my script to set a number of values. These values determines the look of the cipher when printed, such as how much space between each character, the radius of each circle and line width ranging from 0.1pt to twice the radius (as in the example above, forming circle sectors).

Here is the output of the same Lorem Ipsum text but with three different styles.

Someone scribbled some incomprehensible symbols on a wall at my work some time ago. I have no clue what it reads or if they are even real letters. Probably just the work of some bored-out-of-his-wits zombie drone. Nevertheless, they looked somewhat real to me and seemed to follow some kind of inherent system. I let this percolate for some time until finally, the other day, I started to sketch out some very basic glyphs, as I had my morning coffee at Wayne’s sometime around two pm.

I quickly came up with 15 different types of symbols to be used as pairs, one upper and one lower. I subsequently organized them in a table and had the color coded like this.

The blue are glyphs that never will be used for reasons I will go into further down. Red and green are glyphs that are duplicates and the gray are totally unique. As my script works now I use all but the blue glyphs.

Now, the script just randomly picks two glyphs and puts one on top of the other. Nothing more than that. Well, other than I don’t need to have them pre-made as illustrator objects as each one of the 15 glyphs just exists as sequence of four ones and zeros in an array. The numbers tells the script what side, or sides, of a square will be drawn. Get it?

Well, like this.

First image is just to show in what order the sides will be read. The second image represents a glyph that in my array consequently would read 1100.

In order to not have the script draw the same line twice – as is the case with the blue ones – I put this rule in that don’t allow the upper glyphs third side and the lower glyphs first side to pair up. Got that?

First pair is not allowed, instead there are two other combinations to choose from.

Aside from that, I put in a bunch of other features such as, glyph size, stroke width, stroke caps, glyph spacing, number of glyphs, a unique glyphs only-button et cetera…

Thick stroke, square caps and tight spacing.

Slim Stroke, square caps and tight spacing.

Thick stroke, round caps and tight spacing.

Well, if anything it does kinda resemble some sort of alien sci-fi font… for whatever time I would need one…