Ever wondered how to perfectly fill an outline with touching circles? I did -- after seeing the example image in Solving design effect - image made of perfectly arranged circles.
It took me a while to get the proper calculations, but -- Here It Is! A Javascript, written for Illustrator CS4 (it might work on other versions as well), that fills a selected outline with circles. Download zipped script from my site: http://www.jongware.com/binaries/CircleFill.zip, unpack if necessary, and put it in your Illustrator Scripts folder to make it available the next time you run Illy, or anywhere else (you have to browse for it each time).
Select any path -- but no live text, please; you have to convert it to outlines and select each character in turn. Then run the script.
It displays a simple dialog, where you can set a maximum and minimum circle size as a percentage of the selected object size. In addition, you can select either a plain basic color, or select any of your current Swatch Groups; in that case, each of the circles are filled with a random color from that group.
The script may take a while to run. Usually, only a couple of seconds for a simple rectangle, but it may run into minutes for objects with lots of curves and/or holes. I didn't have the guts to run it on a vectorized world map, to recreate Mario "Quasimondo" Klingemann's Foam World Map; but, in theory? Possible. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
This image only took a few minutes:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Enjoy, everyone!
