Gramps + Wordle = Calendar 2010 cover

One gift I give to my family each year at this time is a calendar made with Gramps’ Calendar Report. You can print a subset of your family, print their birthdays, anniversaries, and even show holidays from your country, in your locale’s language. Here is a sample page from that report:

I usually put an old picture on the cover of the calendar, but this year I thought I’d do something different. I had been thinking about something similar to the Surname Cloud Gramplet:

That is a nice representation of the data, and also useful: you can double-click any of the surnames and you’ll get a list of all of the people with that surname. But I was looking for something more artistic. Then I remembered Wordle. Wordle let’s you make images like:

I noticed in the Wordle “advanced” options that one can post a list of words, and their weightings. It wouldn’t take much to make the Surname Cloud Gramplet output the right information, so I created the Wordle Gramplet. It outputs the data, you paste into Wordle, and voila:

If you’d like to make a Gramps Wordle yourself:

  1. Download the zip from WordleGramplet.zip
  2. For Gramps 3.1, take just the file WordleGramplet.py from the zip file and put it in your .gramps plugins directory.
  3. For Gramps 3.2 (trunk), put the unzipped WordleGramplet directory in your .gramps plugins directory.
  4. Start Gramps, go to the Gramplet View, right-click in an open area, select “Add”, and select the Wordle Gramplet
  5. You can change some of the defaults by detaching the Gramplet, and selecting the Options area:
  6. You can change the number of different font sizes to use, select a filter to use, and click Save.
  7. Go to Wordle.net/advanced and paste the output of the gramplet (just the “words: weights”) into the top box
  8. To add the year, put “2010: weight” in the box too, where “weight” is the number representing the size of the year. In the example above, I made it twice the weight of the most common word (eg, “2010: 10”).
  9. You will need to de-select “Remove numbers” under “Language” in the Wordle editor. Change the font, layout, colors, etc.
  10. I used the “open in window” option and made the window big, then took a screen capture.

That’s it! If you have questions, please leave a comment below. If you make a Gramps-Wordle, leave a link to it. Happy New Year!

-Doug

4 Comments

  • Doug Blank

    I put some of my test covers at http://www.wordle.net/gallery?username=D.S.%20Blank

    In the end, I used just one font size for all names (makes them all the same) and made the year really big (“2010: 10”).

  • Doug Blank

    ? ?????? ????????? ?? ???? ????????? ?????????? ? http://www.wordle.net/gallery?username=DS% 20Blank ? ????? ??????, ? ??????????? ?????? ???? ?????? ?????? ??? ???? ???? (?????? ?? ???-????), ? ?????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ??????? ("2010: 10").

  • Susan

    I can’t get this gramplet to work. I am using Windows 7, and there is no gramps folder under c:\Users\{me}\AppData. My working folder is C:\program files (x86)\gramps\, where there is plugins\gramplet and there are many .py and .pyc files there. All of those seem to be working just fine in my gramps program.

    I am using gramps 3.2.4-1.

    Do you have any advice about how to install this with Windows 7?

    Thanks
    Susan

  • dsblank

    With Gramps 3.2, go to menu -> Help -> Plugin Manager -> Install Addons, and put the URL of the .zip file above into the “Path to URL” box. After installing, click on Reload. You can then add the Gramplet to the Gramplet View.

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