komapainter
Komapainter creates PNG images of Shogi pieces (koma). It is inspired by Masafumi Yokoyama's Ruby gem.
This program is a tale of a programmer's hubris and laziness. You can read my sad tale below.
How to Use
Assuming the program is installed somewhere in your PATH, usage is simple:
> komapainter -n 飛車 -s 200 -o rook.png
The first argument is the name of the piece whose image you want to generate. Komapainter supports 1 or 2 character piece names. If the name you supply is more than 2 characters long, the first and last character will appear in the image.
The second argument is the size of the bounding box for the image. The default is 200, so you can omit this argument if that value is what you want.
The third argument is the name of the file to which the image should be saved. If the file already exists, it will be overwritten.
Finally, komapainter supports a -p (promoted) option which will write the piece name in red.
Komapainter supports short and long option names. Options can be specified in any order. Try
komapainter -h
for more details.
Examples
> komapainter -n 飛車 -o hisha.png
> komapainter -p -n と -o tokin.png
> komapainter -n 王将 -o oushou.png
How to Install
Komapainter requires Swift 5.3 or greater.
Note: komapainter uses Apple's CoreGraphics and CoreText libraries. So, although Swift will run on Linux and other systems, you will not be able to compile the program on anything other than a computer running macOS.
After cloning this repository, cd to the newly created directory and enter the command:
> make install
This will compile the program and copy it to /usr/local/bin. You need to have write permissions for the destination.
How to Contribute
Thank you for taking the time to contribute!
There are many ways to contribute in addition to submitting code. Bug reports, feature suggestions, a logo for the project, and improvements to documentation are all appreciated.
Bug Reports and Feature Suggestions
Please submit bug reports and feature suggestions by creating a new issue. If possible, look for an existing open issue that is related and comment on it.
When creating an issue, the more detail, the better. For bug reports in partciular, try to include at least the following information:
- The application version
- The operating system (macOS, Windows, etc) and version
- The expected behavior
- The observed behavior
- Step-by-step instructions for reproducing the bug
- Screenshots for GUI issues
Pull Requests
Ensure the PR description clearly describes the problem and solution. It should include the relevant issue number, if applicable.
Documentation Improvements
Preferably, submit documentation changes by pull request. However, feel free to post your changes to an issue or send them to the project team.
License
This project is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License. For details, please read the LICENSE file.
A real life story of how the sausage is made
A quick gem install shogi_koma to install Yokoyama's code yielded a bunch of unappealing errors while trying to compile the Cairo graphics library. I decided I really didn't want to trace through logfiles and try and determine what the issue was (lazy).
The essence of the piece-drawing code wasn't too many lines and I seemed to recall that there was a Cairo binding for one of my favorite languages, Lua. So I figured 5-10 minutes worth of effort and I could have a working program (hubris).
Well, there are 1/2 dozen Cairo bindings for Lua and it wasn't really clear which was the best choice. So I poked around for a few minutes; made some half-hearted attempts to install various bindings.
Then I thought I'll just throw something together in Swift!
So I learned a few things along the way of building this Swift solution. I started out just tinkering in an (iOS) Xcode Playground; refactored the code to work as both an NSView and a UIView and finally took the plunge to "pure" CoreGraphics/CoreText. In moving from UIKit to CoreGraphics and CoreText, you lose some convenient functions such as UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext() and pngData() on the resulting UIImage; the NSString extension that lets you put text at a CGPoint requires UIKit; and, perhaps most interestingly, although NSAttributedString and NSAttributedString.Key are defined in Foundation, NSAttributedString.Key.font, NSAttributedString.Key.foregroundColor, etc. are not defined in Foundation!
This last issue caused great frustration until I finally puzzled it out. While working with the playground, I had pulled a lot of the code into files in the Soures directory. Whenever I was working on one of those files, Xcode reported an error: Type 'NSAttributedString.Key' has no member 'font'. Then when I switched back to the playground, it compiled and ran fine.
So, was it worth it? Maybe I should have just diagnosed the problem with the Ruby gem. You'll have to be the judge of whether my app is worthwhile; however, I'm happy with what I've learned.