The Hyperbolic Line Converter has gotten a name change to Hyperbolic Lines as it is from now on possible to make new lines by entering degree values. There is also a new option to choose what side of the disk the lines will be drawn.

The new addition to the tools is the Measures script. Measures is useful to create rulers, gauges, scales etc. If a path is selected when pressing the ‘Make Ruler’-button the script will use that path as the spine/baseline of the ruler, otherwise it will create an ordinary straight ruler of entered length. The ‘Length’-option works differently when using percent as unit. The drawn ruler will ALWAYS be 100pt long and the ‘Length’-value is instead used to tell the script how high the scales max value is.

The package – as of 2012/12/29 – contains these scripts:

- Analog Clock
- Circular Bar Graph
- Hyperbolic Line
- Measures
- Polar Grid
- Polar Area / Pie Graph
- Radiating Bars Graph
- Stacks

Download dViz Tools here.

ANALOG CLOCK – v1.01
Make analog clocks that display either the current time or time set by the user. Very simple but may come in handy some time.

CIRCULAR BAR GRAPH – v1.01
A bar graph that bends like a circle. Each bar can be offset from the base as well. The user may set the amount of degrees the bars will turn, from 45°-360°. Another nice feature is the possibility to have variable max values to each bar. For instance: a bar value of 1 with a max value of 2 will look exactly the same as a bar value of 55 with max at 110.

HYPERBOLIC LINE – v1.1
Draw a circle and make sure it is selected before running the script. You can then either; draw lines on the perimeter of the circle, select them and press the ‘Convert Selected Paths’-button, or; enter degree values and press the ‘Make Line From Angles’-button, to produce the hyperbolic lines. With the ‘Draw Side’-list you can choose to draw the lines on the inside or outside of the disk.

MEASURES – v1.0
Measures is useful to create rulers, gauges, scales etc. If a path is selected when pressing the ‘Make Ruler’-button the script will use that path as the spine/baseline of the ruler, otherwise it will create an ordinary straight ruler of entered length. The ‘Length’-option works differently when using percent as unit. The drawn ruler will ALWAYS be 100pt long and the ‘Length’-value is instead used to tell the script how high the scales max value is.

POLAR GRID – v1.0
It has always bothered me that the AI Polar Grid Tool just makes lines. I want each cell to be an own object. This tool does that. Plus, it also supports variable number of sub-divisions per ring. The sourcecode of the main function is located here.

POLAR AREA / PIE GRAPH – v1.0
Pie Charts can be made in AI. In many ways far superior than my take but my version does however offer the possibility to make polar area diagrams as well.

RADIATING BARS GRAPH – v1.0
This graph, as the name so aptly suggests, radiates its bars from a center point. If, using the ‘Bars Touching’ option, the graph turns into a variant of a polar area diagram.

STACKS – v1.01
Stacks is a script to quickly fill an amount of columns and rows with a designated key object.

This is really just a small matter of finding each lines anchors, calculate its angle in regard to the center of the hyperbolic disk and then just replace the straight line with a curved one.
I gotta say that making the disk this way is probably a lot more efficient both in terms of time as well as angle precision. Now, all one would have to do is draw all the connections as straight lines (with so much more control by using say, the pen tools) and afterwards just run the script to substitute the lines.

UPDATE (Feb 9 – 14:02)

I must to admit that I have, for the past days, tried out even a third way of drawing the curves as shown in the images below.As can be seen below, the origin of the circles forming the arcs all lie on the same line IF one of the two points at which the arcs intersects the bounding circle remains the same. This method would have been, by far, the most versitile way of drawing the arcs by utilising both keyboard input as well as a comprehensive mouse interaction tool, but at the same time this requires far more vector handling than I’m comfortable with. Anyway, the “search & replace”-method seem to me to be the best compromise so I guess I’ll just stick with that.

1. Manually type the from/to angle.
2. Clicking with the Scriptographer pen tool anywhere on the artboard as the from/to angles are calculated from the origin of the circle.
3. Or, by a combination of the two methods above.

The script snaps to anchors as well so adding anchors to the circle could be an easy way of creating a regular pattern. Although not “officially” released, the script can be found/downloaded here.

While the two images above has nothing to do with hyperbolic geometry they are nevertheless created by MC Escher – who, on the other hand, was a master of such art. Besides being nice to look at these images serves me as a reminder that I should probably take the time to do something with my Block Mania script. I mean, I spent a lot of time making these, I should make something cool.

What Peter Saville did on Unknown Pleasures is briliant!

But maybe I’m speaking too soon, as when I started writing scripts for Scriptographer, the first thing I did was a complete ripoff of Jürg Lehni‘s Faust.

I called my script Saville Raster… So, I guess I’m as guilty as everyone else!
And if that wasn’t enough. Peter Crnokrak made a nice poster showing the huge number of covers of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart which was featured in the book Data Flow that I recently bought.

That, and Similar Diversity, a project by Philipp Steinweber and Andreas Koller also featured in the book caught my eye as I really liked the arcs – or, rather, lines in hyperbolic geometry.

After a quick look at Wolfram MathWorld on how to calculate the Poincaré Hyperbolic Disk a new idea spawned in my mind.

Fortunately it’s easier to calculate the arcs when dealing with vectors instead of coordinates as they can be created using its length and angle.

My intended project, although it’s a few months off in the future, will rely heavily on these arcs to create some interesting (at least in my mind) infographics.

And as for the music? Well, there are other bands…