Limited character set text generator

Ori Ben-Dor

Does anyone know of a text (or pseudo-text) generator where you can limit the character set (to some subset of the Latin alphabet, that is)?

(The problem with taking a full character set text and deleting unwanted letters is that you quickly end up with too many short or even one letter words, so the result doesn't have the pattern of an actual text.)

Kent Lew

Matthew Butterick put this simple tool together a long time ago. Words, not text.

Miguel Sousa constructed this one. If you click on Options, you can change scripts even.

Ori Ben-Dor

Great, thanks, I'll check them out.

Mark Simonson

There is also this one, from Tim Ahrens. 

Ori Ben-Dor

Thanks to you too!

Ramiro Espinoza

This is what I wrote for myself:

from __future__ import print_function
import random


list = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z', ' ']


for n in range(70):
	random.shuffle(list)
	for n in list:
		print(n, end='')

Benedikt Bramböck

There is also Typable by Ondrej Jób.

Dave Crossland

Cyreal.org/testing (a mirror of the impallari.com/testing page) also has one I think

Ori Ben-Dor

Great, thanks!

Johannes Neumeier

Benedikt Bramböck said:

There is also Typable by Ondrej Jób.

Wow, that one is fantastic, didn't know about it!

I've coded a somewhat related CLI script that you feed UFO and TXT files and it outputs strings of specific length, ideal for finding those nice specimen words of different weights with same font size and length. Aside from reading the available glyphs from the UFO and filtering the possible words by that it also has options for excluding / including letters and letter combinations.