So far I’ve only posted about graphics explorations, but I also intended to talk about coding projects. I’ve been working on one lately that has taken my time away from graphical things, but that’s because I realized I started it quite a while ago. I always meant to finish it but life rarely goes exactly the way you expect it will.
Eleven years ago, I wanted to get out of the game industry and back into software. I’d been working with Python a little at work, and decided to write a meaty personal project to get better at it. I wanted something with a graphical user interface as well, and was not interested in trying to do anything substantial with Tkinter. I started using FLTK because that’s what I was using at work.
Initially it worked great, but I ran into some limitations of FLTK that were making it hard to progress, so I did some research and decided to port the application over to WxWidgets. That seemed to solve my problems, as I found it much more feature-rich (but also a lot heavier) than FLTK. Well, of course I ended up hitting a wall with WxWidgets, so I jumped again to Qt.
Needless to say, after three different UI frameworks, and learning Python along the way, the code was pretty messy. Earlier this year I decided if was going to finish this beast, I needed to do a major refactor. Since then I’ve been reorganizing code, running it through pylint, and trying to take more advantage of Qt instead of using my own solutions. It’s been fun and I’m actually in better shape with the project than I was before the refactor.
So I said all that without even saying what the project is. One of my interests has always been calligraphy and lettering, and I wanted to see if I could make a tool to do digital calligraphy. I know you can generate curves in vector drawing tools, but I wanted to make something purpose-built for calligraphy. It’s been a great challenge, but I’m getting there. Until next time, here’s a work-in-progress screenshot:
