I got this email Tuesday from Joel Holdsworth, announcing that he had ported my Alphabet Soup pseudo-letter-generator from a bitmap to a vector model, and turned it into an Inkscape plug-in. He tells me that the extension will likely be included with Inkscape v0.47.

I cannot begin to express how phenomenally awesome this is. This is the kind of news that keeps me writing, and releasing, little free software projects. Six years ago I wrote Alphabet Soup as a little art project; it was fun. I released it under an open source license, and then never got around to improving it to output a vector format. Then somebody I’ve never met comes along, and not only improves it, but integrates it into a bigger free software project and it will soon be available to thousands of users in a greatly improved form.

You can pull the extension out of Inkscape’s SVN here. You’ll need these files:

share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.inx
share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.py
share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup_config.py
share/extensions/alphabet_soup/*.svg

Thanks Joel. Thanks Inkscape. I’m feeling pretty damn freetarded right now, and it feels good.