Making your own word cloud and tag cloud graphics has never been easier with Wordle (). You have several text input options: copy and paste a section of text in; point the interface at an RSS News Feed of your choice; or put in a Delicious user ID.

What you get is a collection of infinitely changeable graphics, using the frequency of word count in the analysed text to control the size of those same words within the graphic. You have control over the:
* display font
* text case (lower case, upper case etc.);
* removal of common words (a, at, or, the etc.);
* number or words displayed;
* the ability to delete individual words within the cloud;
* colour of background and individual word colours (up to five);
* arrangement of the words (horizontal, vertical, a mix of the two of haphazard);
* rounded corners or straight corners to the word cloud;
* alpabetical or not (a to left through to z on the right); and finally
* a colour edit option to actually control the exact colours of the background and five word colours with RGB, CMYK, HSV etc.

If you save the Wordle text cloud graphic to file, you end up with an asset that can’t be enlarged to poster size, however, I show in this video how to print the file to PDF format. PDFs utilise edge description data to the outlines of all words in the output and this means that you can enlarge the graphic as big as you like and still end up with perfect edge definition to your Wordle word cloud creation.

There are even more control options where you you can get out exactly what you want (words count and colour) but we’ll take a look at that in Part 1.