"Text Utilities" is a useful browser-based tool for geeks. It's a web page that does all sorts of operations on text, e.g. escape/ unescape, hashing, regexp testing.
posted by grumblebee on Jun 24, 2009 - 33 comments

Moments [more inside]
posted by flatluigi on Mar 20, 2009 - 4 comments

Cartype has a huge repository of vehicle logos and other related typography. [more inside]
posted by 1f2frfbf on Dec 15, 2008 - 5 comments

The CSS Text Wrapper allows you to easily make HTML text wrap in shapes other than just a rectangle. You can make text wrap around curves, zig-zags, or whatever you want. All you have to do is draw the left and right edges, then copy the generated code to your web site. From the folks at The Idea Shower who brought us Read It Later.
posted by netbros on Dec 11, 2008 - 12 comments

The Loneliness Engine and other invisible games.
posted by flatluigi on Nov 10, 2008 - 19 comments

This f*cking election. A babble tower.
posted by digaman on Nov 2, 2008 - 100 comments

Boy meets girl, you know how it goes. The catch? They're made from Myriad Pro. This short TED talk by someone called Rives was cute, and whimsical enough to make me smile. [more inside]
posted by oxford blue on Nov 1, 2008 - 18 comments

Hilda Magazine ― prose, poetry, illustrations, photography, video, and music from a wide assortment contemporary artists. [contains some nude art images] [more inside]
posted by netbros on Oct 29, 2008 - 3 comments

Word Spectrum; SearchClock; Digg Rings; Bible Cross-references: the gorgeous analytical vizualizations of Chris Harrison. [more inside]
posted by cortex on Sep 18, 2008 - 17 comments

Some are calling it the "Kindle Killer". (Demo launch video at engadget.) Plastic Logic's new e-reader, expected to be out in the first half of 2009, does promise to offer a lot that Kindle and most other other popular e-readers don't, like a larger display, big enough to provide a newspaper or magazine layout; touch-based markup and annotation; the ability to read standard documents and other file types without conversion; (promised) Wi-Fi connectivity (including the ability to transfer documents between readers); and last but not least, a screen display that you can hit with a shoe, and isn't that something we've all been waiting for during these tense times? [more inside]
posted by taz on Sep 13, 2008 - 85 comments

The continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts. In place of the long-term view of technological transformations, which underlies the common notion that we have just entered a new era, the information age, I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable. Let's begin with the Internet and work backward in time.

The Library in the New Age by Robert Darnton, historian and Director of the Harvard Library. A wide-ranging overview of the status of libraries in the modern world, touching on such subjects as: journalist poker games, French people liking the smell of books, bibliography at Google, news dissemination in the 18th Century, book piracy and the different texts of Shakespeare. Some responses: Defending the Library of Google, The Future in the Past and Librarians Need a Better Apologetic.
posted by Kattullus on Jun 1, 2008 - 22 comments

A poem that builds upon itself and grows as the world wide web grows. The Apostrophe Engine is a website operated by Bill Kenney and Darren Wershler-Henry. It is the source of the poems in apostrophe, a book published by ECW Press in 2006. The home page of the Apostrophe Engine site presents the full text of a poem called "apostrophe", written by Bill in 1993. In this digital version of the poem, each line is now a hyperlink. How it works. [more inside]
posted by Fizz on May 28, 2008 - 29 comments

Giant Twittering Typewriter in Second Life. Type here (SLURL) and press the carriage return and it posts to here. Yay. [more inside]
posted by brownpau on May 1, 2008 - 42 comments

Enter text, get an mp3. Make a call, get a text. Talk into your phone, send a text.
posted by desjardins on Dec 1, 2007 - 14 comments

Wellcome Images This collection of thousands of high-quality images includes anatomical images, rare books and manuscripts, posters, photos, and more. Also includes galleries on war, witchcraft, wellness, and other subjects.
posted by hortense on Aug 30, 2007 - 10 comments

Avatar Shakespeare Lady Macbeth Interpreted by Dame Microsoft Mary
posted by janetplanet on Jul 22, 2007 - 7 comments

Dasher is text input informed by information theory. It's also trippy. David MacKay recently gave a talk in the Google TechTalks series. You can download a prototype at the official site. Plenty useful, but perhaps also a new metaphor for writing?
posted by ontic on Jun 2, 2007 - 33 comments

A Better Way to Read Text Online? By reorganizing text into cascading patterns, more circular (even vaguely poetic) than the usual dull horizontal layout, visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) increases online reading comprehension and efficiency while reducing eyestrain. Among high school students, who read with the format over an entire academic year, the VSTF method increased both academic achievement and long-term reading proficiency by more than a full standard deviation over randomized controls. Try it out. (Any login works)
posted by gottabefunky on May 13, 2007 - 48 comments

IntraText Digital Library - a few thousand texts in English and many other languages in a heavily hyperlinked concordance format.
posted by Wolfdog on Feb 16, 2007 - 5 comments

Paleography: Reading Old Handwriting, 1500-1800. And don't forget to use your new skills to save the accused woman from the Ducking Stool.
posted by Miko on Jan 4, 2007 - 23 comments

"Treasuremytext allows you to store SMS Messages (text messages) from your mobile phone online [...] generates a realtime RSS stream of saved messages for viewing by others.: "You gotta realise what u want from me, i ain't here for you to walk on, i'm happy the way things r goin but don't really know where i stand." [Incidentally much of the text here is NSFW.]
posted by feelinglistless on Aug 26, 2006 - 13 comments

I like to write in a plain-text editor, and I've finally found a way to track edits! I've just started col[][l]aborating on a k[k]new book. This si[i][y]stem will come in handy. [][][thanks, Internet!]
posted by grumblebee on Jul 5, 2006 - 71 comments

Caligraft - computational calligraphy.
posted by Wolfdog on Jun 19, 2006 - 14 comments

Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient. Oldie, but a goodie. All text, no pretty pictures.
posted by ontic on Apr 12, 2006 - 109 comments

Under Age Text? "Former senior public servant Nick Gill was sentenced to 14 days' jail, suspended on the rising of the court, and fined $3000 after being found guilty of having 66 stories, featuring mostly young boys, on his desktop computer." All text. There were no images to found. Australian fans of Harry Potter should probably rethink that slash masterpiece, and toss out their copies of Lolita and the latest VC Andrews novels.
posted by FunkyHelix on Apr 8, 2006 - 76 comments

ungreek.toolbot.com, alternate greeking for those days when you can't stand to read Lorem ipsum one more time.
posted by signal on Oct 2, 2005 - 8 comments

Forget love letters, it's love texts that are all the rage now! "I turned off the phone, dumbfounded. How had we managed to speed through all the stages of an actual relationship almost solely via text message? I'd gone from butterflies to doubt to anger at his name on the screen, before we even knew each other. That was it, I decided: no more text-message flirtations for me. From now on I'd stick to more old-fashioned ways of getting to know a guy. Like e-mail."
posted by JPowers on Jul 24, 2005 - 23 comments

H2O Playlist: a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event. With tags, rss and other good stuff. And this time the color scheme is quite nice.
posted by signal on Jul 15, 2005 - 6 comments

AT&T Text to Spech put out by AT&T labs is interesting to play around with. Select your language and accent and then go wild. You can even translate if you select the right accent.
posted by tozturk on May 7, 2005 - 34 comments

Cellphedia is a thesis project created by Limor Garcia (NYU). It's a cell phone application that allows to send and receive encyclopedia-type inquiries through Text messaging. A user will be able to get all the information they need – from “how old is the queen of England?” to “how many miles is the Brooklyn Bridge?” – through a real-time social network, while walking in the street.
posted by stbalbach on May 3, 2005 - 6 comments

Text adventures by Adam Cadre, including the amazing Photopia.
posted by jimmy on Feb 13, 2005 - 13 comments

A multiplayer text editor . Free and realtime. I think this is my new favorite thing.
posted by 31d1 on Jan 19, 2005 - 21 comments

lol war kthxbye (not Iraq)
posted by esch on Nov 17, 2004 - 37 comments

The works of Sir Thomas Browne, with a selection of other texts not by him.
posted by kenko on Nov 11, 2004 - 7 comments

Grind. Endless drudgery. Too much in your in-tray, not enough in your out-tray. You put your headphones on, but it doesn't really help. You want a distraction - just for a moment or two. "A happy employee is a productive employee" you justify to yourself, although you're not convinced. Then it happens. A 24 carat nugget of plain text escapism lands in your in-box. You're an alt-tab, double-click away from sheer bliss. DNRC; A.Word.A.Day; FlipFlopFlyin Newsletter; The Plain Text Gazette; and the previously mentioned Snowmail and Newsnight Newsletters, which take a less formal but equally sharp look at the day's news, with anecdotes and observations thrown in. What other quality plain text mail lists are around?
posted by nthdegx on Sep 29, 2004 - 6 comments

Devil Worship: The Sacred Books and Traditions of the Yezidiz , by Isya Joseph, 1919. 'This is one of the only public domain sources of information on the religious beliefs of the Yezidi, a small group originally from the northern region of Iraq. Although they speak Kurdish, they are a distinct population from the Kurds. The Yezidi are notable because they have been described as devil-worshippers, which has naturally led to constant persecution by the dominant Islamic culture of the region ... They have many unique beliefs, such as that the first Yezidi were created by Adam by parthenogenesis separately from Eve ... ' New on sacred-texts.com.
posted by plep on Sep 17, 2004 - 4 comments

Are you a typoholic? It starts so innocently. One day you're mildly interested in the difference between display and text typefaces. Soon you can distinguish between teardrop and beak terminals. Suddenly you're annoying everyone in the movie theater by yelling out the names of all the fonts used in the credits. What's so scary is that you never saw it coming. You, my friend, are a type freak.
posted by ColdChef on Apr 29, 2004 - 36 comments

MetaFilter as a ransom note. Crazified by crazy sites. [via Adactio]
posted by mathowie on Nov 16, 2003 - 11 comments

Matrix in ASCII. Nice.
posted by oissubke on Nov 13, 2003 - 17 comments

Hydra, the much-loved Rendevous-enabled collaborative text editor, recently ran into legal trouble over their use of a common proper noun (sound familiar?), so for a time they were simply named #####. But no more; say hello to SubEthaEdit! Hmmm. Very ... hitchhiker.
posted by brownpau on Aug 26, 2003 - 17 comments

Maledicta Press Online May your balls be skewered neatly On Poseidon's triple spear! (it's all text, but NSFW warning if someone's reading over your shoulder. Found because both MeFi and this site were listed together on this page.)
posted by WolfDaddy on Apr 17, 2003 - 9 comments

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike...
posted by grumblebee on Sep 18, 2002 - 18 comments

Dasher is a new way to input text on a Pilot or any computer without a keyboard. There's a version available for download to try out on your desktop, using your mouse. It really is quite freaky to use. The amazing thing is, it actually appears to work. After a couple of minutes experimenting, it's almost as fast as typing for a slow typist like myself.
posted by salmacis on Jun 26, 2002 - 21 comments

Remember Zork, Planetfall, and the other creations of late game company Infocom? Well, "interactive fiction," as the format is called, is still alive and well. Every year the IF community -- which is known for releasing work of quality far surpassing even Infocom's masterpieces -- holds a competition for short works, and this year's contestants have been released! Read this post's comments for more info...
posted by tweebiscuit on Sep 30, 2001 - 13 comments