The Encoding Process Developed to Translate Existing Textual Data into Color
I have used several methods to turn existing text block into the color text. As well as a program to turn text into color image data.
Although computers can represent colors in fonts fairly easily (we can change the colors of the fonts in our documents to one of a million colors in almost all applications used to process text) there is no way to embed color information in the font itself. (TrueType and Post Script fonts which are the most common used in applications). This has forced me to develop a 2 part approach to encoding color into fonts in order to have a standardized system.
Part 1: Colorizing the Letters
I have decided to use the Rich Text Format (.rtf)* as the most compatible and universal format that can still accurately hold the color data and formatting necessary to display the color text. (*This format is both PC and Mac compatible and can be opened by almost all word processing applications without the loss of the color data.)
I have developed a small Java based Web applications that will sort through blocks of text and then associated each individual element within the text with a distinct color. The online application will produce the finished (.rtf) code. This code then needs to be then copied into a basic text editor and saved as plain text encoding with the extension of .rtf to insure that your text reader of choice can display the formatting correctly. <ColorConverter.html>
When the RTF document is opened by a word processing application, the individual letter colors will be displayed for each character in the document.
The program works by identifying individual letters within a block of text and then replacing the letters with the “code” that tells the the word processor how to visually render that individual letter. The program reduces the block of text to all lower-case letters before mapping the existing text into the preselected color which needs to be corrected by hand.
Part 2: Mapping to a New Font
Once the text is converted to the correct RGB color set for each character, one must then assign the hand made font/glyph to the letters to improve readability. This is done within the text processing application itself (MS Word, InDesign, Text Edit, Flash, Acrobat, etc..). The font must be installed on the individual computer before launching the text processing application. Color Font available at :<http://www.denison.edu/~faurc/color/ColorFont.ttf>
Matrix image from Text
Another method that I used to convert text into color is to use a program in Mathamatica to turn the text block into a square matrix of individual color pixels. This program that I have developed removes all superficial punctuation and grammar, converts all text to lowercase and then proceeds to render the text as a image where each pixel represents a letter. This produces highly condensed images/texts that are reminiscent of microfilm.
This grid is saved as a raster based image while in the former method the color text is vector based and completely selectable and usable within an application that work with text (it can even be converted to normal text by changing the font back to something standard).
Example of a color matrix from text: entire text from the play Hamlet
Convert a block of text into color at: