I saw the Wordle site for making word clouds and was really impressed. I had a few ideas for doing things differently–showing phrases instead of individual words for example. So I wrote my own version.
It displays phrases, words, or combinations of words and phrases. Text size indicates the relative frequency of different words. The output is a PDF file.
The algorithm used to arrange the words places them randomly on open spaces in the image. Horizontal and vertical placements alternate. There is a bias toward placements towards the center of the image. This helps keep the cloud together. Words difficult to place are shrunk up to 10%. The Postscript font metrics are used to find the exact size of each letter. The allows close word placement.
Here it is: freq_8-08.zip
System requirements: OS X or Linux.