Eons ago in my various dawdlings I came across the concept of `rivers' in text¹, likely as a result of looking for some solution to a problem I had with LaTeX. More recently (I suppose around late May 2017) I thought applying this typographical concept to fixed-width fonts might result in something interesting.

So, one lazy day I threw together a small demo of what that might look like, and here it is. Plug in some text (currently I don't know how well non-ascii text is handled, but no harm in trying it), play with the options, and see what happens.

Initially I thought that this might be something fun to use for maybe generating levels in some video game or some abstract background art. Initially I was somewhat dissatisfied with the results, but after playing with different types of data I have come to appreciate it more, and might want to use this for something like that at some point.

Below are the results of giving this a sample nginx configuration file (on the left) and the first five paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum (on the right). The background is a slightly-transformed version of the text you just read!