There are no universal guidelines for creating ambigrams. Ambigrammists have different ways of approaching problems. A number of ambigrammists have published information on the methods they use. Langdon's WordPlay and Burkhard Polster's Eye Twisters, in particular, contain information useful to new ambigrammists.
There have been a few attempts at automated creation of ambigrams, two of which have been available on the Internet. The first, the letter-based ambigram generator Ambigram.matic, was created in 1996 by David Holst, using a database of 351 letter glyphs, in which each letter mapped to another letter. The generator could only map a word to itself or to another word that was the same length. Because of this, most of the generated ambigrams were of poor quality.
The second generator, the Glyphusion generator, is used by FlipScript (a web retailer of personalized ambigram products) and other companies, and was created in 2007. According to the company, the Glyphusion generator uses a database of more than 200,000 parts of letters[13]. Because the generator uses parts of letters, its results are significantly better than the earlier letter-based generator, but is still limited when compared with a human artist. It currently (2009) generates ambigrams in two lettering styles (blackletter and a cursive blackletter) and it cannot produce ambigrams in some cases.
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