What is the correspondence between word weight and word size?

Hello!

I am an academic researcher and I want to use Tagul word clouds in one of my papers. In the note to the word cloud, I would like to report the relationship between the word weight and the word size.

At first, I thought that the font size is proportional to weight. But this doesn't seem to be true. Indeed, for the same weight (and using the "keep as is" option in layout for both words amounts and words relative size), words appear with different font sizes, for example:

- longer words tend to appear smaller
- both the height and width of the characters in the word seem to matter (for words with the same number of characters)
- whether the ellipse or the square shape is chosen matters for the size of the words.

Overall, it seems that the surface occupied by the word (including specific height and width of characters) is proportional to the weight, but this isn't quite right either.

Could you summarize, in terms as precise as possible, how the size of the word relates to the weight (for a given shape such as cloud, ellipse, square)?

I very much appreciate your help!

Ioana Marinescu.

Ioana,

The algorithm behind the words sizing is quite complex.
In simple terms Tagul finds a place for a word and then tries to scale the word according to its size. If scaled word doesn't fit into available space then Tagul just places the word just making it fit.

Tagul considers only words heights when scaling. Because otherwise (when for example word's occupied space is considered) it often happens that one letter word seems much bigger than several letters word while both have the same size.

I've to admit that Tagul is not much suitable for scientific results. It is more a tool to create beautiful (gorgeous :) looking word clouds while sacrificing words sizes accurancy.