Tek wrote:

> I wanted some random meaningless alien letters for a space scene I've been 
> working on, so I decided to make a pigment filled with random alien 
> gibberish!

Looks neat and very elegant solution! The only problem I see
is that the perfect grid may be a bit distracting. I just played
with a derived pigment that uses different spacings for each
line although it is not really a proportional font:

#declare CELL_WIDTH = 10000;
#declare LINE_STEPS = 10;
#declare MAX_FACTOR = 0.5;

#declare AlieneseProportional = pigment
{
   cells translate -0.5*x scale <CELL_WIDTH,1,1>
   pigment_map
   {
     [0.0 Alienese scale <1.0/CELL_WIDTH,1,1>]
     #local LINE_STEP=1;
     #while (LINE_STEP < LINE_STEPS)
       [LINE_STEP/LINE_STEPS Alienese scale
        <(1.0+(LINE_STEP-1)*MAX_FACTOR/(LINE_STEPS-1))/CELL_WIDTH,1,1>]
       [LINE_STEP/LINE_STEPS Alienese scale
        <(1.0+(LINE_STEP)*MAX_FACTOR/(LINE_STEPS-1))/CELL_WIDTH,1,1>]
       #local LINE_STEP=LINE_STEP+1;
     #end
     [1.0 Alienese scale <(1.0+MAX_FACTOR)/CELL_WIDTH,1,1>]
   }
   warp {turbulence <0.2,0.0,0.0> lambda 1.0 octaves 1}
}

I added a slight bit of turbulence in x direction as well,
although that causes the spacing to vary at different y
positions within a line as well. To get rid of that I think one
would need to use turbulence with a tweaked noise function.
Using stronger turbulence can also give a nice
"handwritten alienese" effect.

One thing I completely didn't understand was the need to
reverse the cell scaling for the inner pigment. I would have
expected that scaling the cell pattern up would give me larger
cells but not affect the scaling of pigments in the pigment_map.
But leaving out the correction factor just gave me horizontal
streaks (3.6.1 and 3.7 beta 39).

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