heraldic

One word, one blazon. Not carved in stone — carved into the text: the signature (symmetry, palette, density) is fixed by what you type, but every invocation redistributes the particles differently. Same seal, never the same imprint twice.

Braille-glyph rendering, cold colors #6B7EC4 / #8A9AD4, black background. No frame, no outline — the blazon floats in the terminal like an artifact decoded live.

How it works

The text is hashed (hashString) to seed a first deterministic pseudo-random stream (mulberry32) that derives the blazon's family: symmetry type (axial, or radial k=3/4/6/8), palette bias, density band. This stream depends only on the text — fixed for a given word.

Each generation also draws a fresh random entropy (crypto.randomBytes), XORed with the text hash to form the final seed. That seed drives a second mulberry32 stream that places the particle clusters and their scatter — this is the stream that varies on every draw, not the first one. Result: same text → same visual family, different entropy → different variant within that family.

(text, entropy) fixed → strictly reproducible grid (guaranteed by node --test). /reroll just draws a new entropy for the current text, without retyping it.

Full pipeline: hash → family parameters → particles → dot field → braille raster → structural overlay → colorize.

Installation

npm install -g heraldic

Usage

heraldic:~$ chateau
[colored braille grid]
SEED 0x4F2A91C3  REV 2.6  UNIT/D-01

heraldic:~$ /reroll
[new variant, same family, new SEED]

heraldic:~$ /export png
écrit: chateau.png

heraldic:~$ /help
commandes disponibles :
  <texte>              génère un blason à partir du texte
  /reroll               nouveau tirage du même texte
  /export <fmt>         exporte le dernier blason (fmt: png, png-story, mp4, mp4-story, txt, ans, svg)
  /clear                 vide l’écran
  /quit                  quitte le programme
  /help                  affiche cette liste

(the CLI's own output stays in French — that's what you'll actually see)

Video export

The mp4 and mp4-story formats render the decode animation to MP4 video. This requires the ffmpeg system binary — install with brew install ffmpeg (macOS) or apt install ffmpeg (Linux/Debian).

Supported export formats:

• png: single frame PNG (1080×1377)
• png-story: tall story-format PNG (1080×1920) — same 1080×1377 render as png, letterboxed (centered, black margins top/bottom) rather than stretched
• png-clean: motif only, no decorative frame, no SEED metadata line (1080×1350)
• png-clean-story: png-clean render (1080×1350), letterboxed in a 1080×1920 canvas
• mp4: video with decode animation (1080×1376, 30fps, ~2.2s) — height rounds down for H.264/yuv420p even-dimension requirement
• mp4-story: tall video with decode animation (1080×1920, 30fps, ~2.2s) — same letterbox treatment as png-story
• mp4-clean: motif-only video, no frame, no SEED line (1080×1350, already even — no H.264 rounding)
• mp4-clean-story: mp4-clean render, letterboxed in a 1080×1920 canvas
• txt: plain text
• ans: ANSI colored text
• svg: scalable vector

Local development

cd cli
npm install
npm link

Tests

npm test