In the Margins

Multicloud Tips and Tricks

Typically, only two or three rows of word clouds produced by Multicloud are visible on the screen. To see more clouds, you must scroll down, hiding the ones at the top. If you wish to compare clouds that are far apart, you can drag and drop the clouds you are interested in to get them to appear closer together. Although useful, this drag and drop method is not always ideal, particularly if you wish to use the word clouds in an external presentation. This article provides some tips for how to get manipulate the Lexos Multicloud output.

Currently, Lexos does not have a function to export the word clouds produced by Multicloud, and screen shots will only capture the visible clouds. Luckily, most browsers have extensions or plugins that will allow you to capture a complete web page as an image. A good example is for Firefox is Fireshot, but others are available for Firefox and other browsers. Once you have captured the full web page as an image, you can use an image editor to crop the image so that it contains just the word clouds.

The next step is to divide the image into smaller images. For presentations, it might be desirable to have each row of three word clouds as a separate image. You could take individual screen shots of each row, but this article will outline another method using the GIMP image editor. GIMP has a tool called Guides which allows you to designated boundaries for slicing up the image. If you have an image with ten rows of word clouds, you can insert nine guides between them. (It is also possible to insert vertical guides to divide individual clouds in each row.) You can then use GIMP's Slice function to slice up the image into ten smaller images, one for each row. As a bonus, the Slice tool produces an html file with a table containing each of the smaller images. This is a good starting point for using them in a web presentation. However, the smaller images can also be inserted into tools like word processors or slideshow presentations. If you don't use GIMP, your chosen image editor may have similar tools.

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