[Visualize] Shaped Word Clouds

[shaunmcgough]

Kibana could benefit from having people select from a set of shapes for word clouds. We could start with; heart, plus, arrow forward, circle, smiley face, and star.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app

[shaunmcgough]

@monfera @wylieconlon - just FYI in case you're looking at this in your respective projects. ;p

[monfera]

I'm working on text fill but it's a different enough problem to warrant a separate algo, as the constraints are different (in word cloud, word positioning and orientation are arbitrary, while in annotations, words need to form a sentence or paragraph). There are some neat algos. Convex shapes, or ones with fine detail or holes eg. a smiley or anything with acute angles (eg. parts of an arrow) are more challenging.

[monfera]

@shaunmcgough we looked into it recently, as the Kibana word cloud is slated to be replaced with the new elastic-charts word cloud. The algo there is not conducive to arbitrary shapes, it'd be a researchy task. Also, there are some more semantic alternatives eg. here—at the expense of admitting even less contouring.

There are a couple of python libraries eg. this which does contouring, the first step would be to see if such contouring is trivial, super hard or something in between. If we're lucky, it's a couple of days with tests etc. but not sure of the level of need, also in light of fair criticism toward word clouds as a genre.

[stratoula]

Thank you for contributing to this issue, however, we are closing this issue due to inactivity as part of a backlog grooming effort. If you believe this feature/bug should still be considered, please reopen with a comment.