Adding graphics (sort of)

Two things I hoped to do for the Fivebyfivia re-release were to make better cover art and also write a better guide. While the guide was technically correct (the best kind of correct, of course, as Futurama fans know,) it might not really have been easy reading for people who were relatively new to chess. I realize how I don't mind text at all--text chessboards provide a lot of nostalgia for me, since I remember days playing on a text-base chess MUD and being able to flag my opponents for a time forfeit because my university had a faster internet speed. Then the server admins figured how to account for lag, the bums.

But I actually started with the sequel, which had about 100 possible solutions to the various puzzles. I wanted to at least try to fit a few on the same screen or page. Also, I'd already cranked out the results with a script, so I wouldn't need to enter any data. It went smoothly. It wasn't too bad once I broke down what to do:

1. draw a chessboard in MSPaint. This isn't hard to do with the flip horizontally/vertically functions.
2. find graphics I can pull icons from. I went with Free Serif.
3. write a Python script to convert the text maps/piece position data to graphics

I'd done work making maps at GameFAQs, so this was not hard. I'd actually never really used PIL before, and I wasn't surprised it was pretty easy to get going. The main concern was getting the transparency right. I had to download GIMP to make the parts inside the chess pieces white and not transparent.

So I moved on to Fivebyfivia, working through the tutorial, the three scenarios, and the jumping scenario. The final scenario didn't have any pieces,  so I had to use numbers, and that created an additional problem of dealing with widths once I moved from one digit to two, so they don't quite look centered.

That's mop-up work, though. Fortunately, StackOverflow came to the rescue for a big-picture view of how to center text with PIL. The arithmetic may be a nuisance, but I'll deal.

The cover art preview is here. openclipart had just what I wanted, and the rest was a silly MSPaint job.