Yes.

The images you create with Wordle are yours to use in any way you choose. You may print T-Shirts, business cards, brochures, what have you. On the other hand, when you place an image in the gallery, anyone else can use it too! So if you want to keep it to yourself, print it out without saving it.

The images created by the Wordle application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Details:

Images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

If you use a screen-capture, PDF, or other image representation of a Wordle on this site, you must attribute the image to http://wordle.net/.

Yes. The images created by the Wordle application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Details:

Images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

You may take a Wordle, put it on your book cover, your t-shirt, your campaign poster, what have you. You may get rich off it. Just tell people how you made the image, or, if you're using one from the gallery, where you got it.

If you use a screen-capture, PDF, or other image representation of a Wordle on this site, you must attribute the image to http://wordle.net/.

See the next FAQ for information about using the Wordle applet or other intellectual property from this web site.

Unfortunately, no.

Certain parts of the code are (c) IBM Corporation, and all rights are reserved. You may not decompile or reverse-engineer the applet and then make a derivative work based on your knowledge of that code. You may not use the applet on your own web site or, as a library, in your own work.

Images of Wordles are licensed as described above.

The text and design of the web site itself are licensed as follows:

Wordle.net by Jonathan Feinberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

You may not use the text or design of the Wordle web site itself in any commercial enterprise, nor may you create a derivative work.

You may not copy or redistribute the Wordle applet itself under any circumstances. Certain parts of Wordle are (c) IBM Corporation, and all rights are reserved. You may not decompile or reverse-engineer the applet and then make a derivative work based on your knowledge of that code. You may not use the applet on your own web site or, as a library, in your own work.

All of the fonts used in Wordle are copyrighted by their respective creators and owners, and are used on Wordle either by virtue of their licenses, or with explicit permission from their owners for such use.

See the credits page for individual credits. Let me know if I've failed to credit you for your work.

Most Common Problem: Firewall

Many folks who see the red "X" or other symptoms of a missing Wordle applet are suffering from a misconfigured firewall. Can you retrieve this file?

http://wordle.appspot.com/j/v1096/wordle.jar

If not, then you must either turn off your firewall, configure it to permit JAR files, or... give up!

Still no joy? Read on!

Wordle requires a web browser that can run Java applets. You must enable Java applets in your browser. Here are instructions for enabling Java applets to run in your browser.

People with Macs: please make sure you're up to date via the "Software Update" control panel. Macs can be configured to use any of several versions of Java. You must be using Java 5 or 6, and not Java 1.4. You can access this setting via the application Applications»Utilities»Java»Java Preferences. Make sure you're using a supported version of Java before reporting a bug.

People on Windows, Linux, and Solaris: if you're having trouble, please update to the latest Java plugin before reporting a bug. The latest version for these platforms as of this writing is Java 6 update 7.

If you've done all of the above, and it's not working, please clear your Java cache, clear your browser cache, and restart your browser.

If it's still not working, and you'd like to help me track down bugs and incompatibilities in the Wordle Java applet, please follow these steps:

• Make sure your Java console is enabled. Here's how. Mac OS X/Windows
• Close all browser tabs currently open to Wordle.net.
• Quit your browser. Make sure there are no browser windows left open at all. For example, sometimes the "Downloads" window might still be lurking somewhere.
• Restart your browser, and repeat the steps you took that led to the problem before.
• If and when the problem happens again, select all of the Java console text, and paste it into an email to me. Include your operating system, browser, and browser version. If you do not include the contents of your Java console in your email, I cannot help you. Please don't send me a screen capture of your console. Instead, select the console text, copy it, and paste it into the email.

Thanks, in advance, for spending your time helping me and other Wordle users.

Wordle, as it stands, is inappropriate for classroom use. This is because I do not censor the content that appears on Wordle (I couldn't possibly; there are thousands a week), and, therefore, it's possible to find images in the public gallery that are entirely unsuitable for younger users. I regret this, and hope to address it some day, but that's how it is for now.

Keep in mind that Wordle is quite new, having existed for only a few months, and that I hadn't anticipated that people would find uses for beyond entertainment. Now that educators have made their wishes known to me—I've received over 100 letters from teachers—I'll put my mind to a solution. It won't come immediately, but something will come.

I cannot moderate or filter Wordle, as many thousands are created each week. I also cannot become an arbiter of decency. Therefore, unless someone has exposed your personal information (such as your name and phone number), I'm not going to take it down.

I'd like, eventually, to provide a "safer" Wordle experience for younger users, or others who are offended by explicitly sexual or derogatory language. But for now, this place will remain unmoderated and unfilitered.

"Stemming" means understanding different words as variations of some root or stem, e.g., "walking", "walked", and "walks" are understood as variations on "walk". Many people have asked whether Wordle could do this to text, and show only the roots.

Unfortunately, it would go a bit beyond the scope of Wordle to do that kind of analysis. I'd also feel bound to provide stemming for all of the supported languages. Given my limited time, and given the size of the libraries that would be required to do the stemming, Wordle will not be doing stemming in the foreseeable future.

Wordle uses the number of times a word appears in a text to determine its relative size. See the next question for details.

The size of a word in the visualization is proportional to the number of times the word appears in the input text. So, for example, if you type

apple banana banana grape grape grape

into the create page's text field, you'll see that banana's font size is twice apple's, and grape's font size is 3/2 that of banana's.

Yes! You can use either the Unicode "non-breaking space" character, \u00A0, or the tilde character ~ between words that go together. The tilde will be converted to a space when drawing the words, and the words will be treated as a single word. See http://blog.wordle.net/2008/06/keep-words-together-with-tilde.html.

Wordle is a Java applet, and Java applets are not permitted to write anything to your disk. So, while the applet could generate a jpeg, it wouldn't be able to give it to you!

You can certainly take a screenshot of the Wordle applet.

Sure!

There's a "Print..." button below the Wordle area, on the left-hand side. Press it. You will be prompted to allow the Wordle "Java applet" to access your printer. Please check the checkbox that says "Always permit", and accept the dialog.

On the Mac, you'll have to press the "Print..." button again. Boo.

Mac users can simply "Save as PDF" from their built-in printer dialog.

Windows users will need to use third-party software to generate a PDF from the print dialog. Adobe Acrobat is fine, but I happen to use the free-as-in-beer CutePDF Writer. I have no relationship to the folks who make CutePDF, nor do I take any responsibility for anything that might happen as a result of your using it. If you do use CutePDF, you'll also need to install Ghostscript, a free-as-in-speech PostScript interpreter.

The PDFs you make in this way are fully scalable, and suitable for making posters, T-Shirts, what have you. Please tell me about anything interesting you've done with Wordle.

Sure!

Get yourself a printer driver that generates SVG. I tried the proprietary SVGMaker on Windows, and was very pleased with the result. I have no relationship to the folks who make SVGMaker, nor do I take any responsibility for anything that might happen as a result of your using it.

Or, print to PDF, as described above, and import the PDF into Inkscape, a free-as-in-speech vector graphics editor, whose native format is SVG. Inkscape runs on every contemporary OS.

If you know of an interesting text source that exposes a JSON interface, then I'd be happy to add a field for it on the "create" page. Unfortunately, a web site that doesn't expose its data via JSON is not useful to Wordle, because Wordle does all of its text processing on your computer, in the browser. A JSON URL can be dynamically retrieved without hitting the Wordle server.

A scalable web service should take no more than a few tens of milliseconds to do its work. To create a Wordle requires multiple seconds in a Java runtime. (That pretty animation is not for show; it's really laying things out during the animation). Therefore, Wordle will always apportion the CPU-intensive stuff to you, the user, and your CPU.

As of this writing, Wordle is sustaining 10 hits per second. There's no way on Earth to render Wordles at that speed. Well there is a way, but it involves way more money than I've got.

As mentioned on the credits page, I wrote the core layout algorithms on company time. That code belongs to IBM, so it isn't mine to share. I'm sorry that I can't share it with you.

If you do not save your Wordle to the gallery, no information leaves your workstation at any time. You may compose a Wordle, mess around with fonts, layouts, colors, take a screenshot, print it out, without ever sending any information over the network.

If you do save your Wordle to the gallery, then only the word frequencies for the words that appear in the Wordle are sent. There's no way to reconstruct the source text from that information. You have to exercise your own judgement as to whether the Wordle you've created exposes private information. Wordles cannot be deleted from the gallery once created, as there are no authenticated users.